The intellectual follies: a memoir of the literary venture in New York and Paris.

THIS IS A startlingly good book, even possessing some original, formal interest. I had been aware of Lionel Abel as one of the "New York intellectuals" of the Forties and Fifties. He was at the time a frequent contributor to Partisan Review and other journals, and he was often embroiled in polemics with others of the New York intellectuals of the period. So I settled down with this memoir expecting to enjoy some choice gossip and an evocation of the period--of which we have had several recently, as surviving members of the group hover in the vicinity of threescore and ten--but there is much more to this book than gossip and anecdote (though there is plenty of both). Here, certainly, are New York and Paris--as well as, once again, Philip Rahv, Dwight Macdonald, Meyer Schapiro, Mary McCarthy, William Phillips, Paul Goodman, and many others.

In many respects, however, Mr. Abel is a European as well as a New York intellectual, at home in St. Germain des Pres with the group that gathered around Sartre in the years after the war, and we hear much about Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Camus, Jean Wahl. It is in his European aspect that Abel is involved with a wider range of ideas, and at a more impressive degree of mastery than we are accustomed to in his more familiar New York circle. Thus (and here in part is the formal originality of this memoir) he frequently interrupts his narrative to include mini-essays on philosophy, modern painting, politics, the theater, and other subjects. These are consistently brilliant and become very much a part of the overall narrative.

For example, Abel, an accomplished playwright, is highly analytical about the formal issues raised by the theather. He is excellent on the social circumstances under which the absurdist drama arose during the Fifties, and, by extension, on the Social circumstances of all successful theater. A play, he argues, must give its audience "what it wants" in a way not required for a novel or a lyric, because the audience in the theater is uniquely part of the play. Abel adds that the great playwright always gives the audience "something more" than "what it wants." John Milton thought of writing his own version of Macbeth, but didn't. Abel thought of taking up Milton's project, but didn't: and, as his own "something more," provides us with an altogether plausible precis of the Macbeth John Milton might have written.

In a harrowing and comic chapter called "Breakup," Abel places the demise of the New York intellectuals as a group in 1958, when, at a meeting where several of them got drunk, they could not bring themselves to sign a statement condemning the Soviets for their treatment of Boris Pasternak. The New York intellectuals, he says, could not make themselves do anything that might be construed as injurious to "the Left" or as endorsing U.S. policy, even when they could no longer define what "Left" meant. Where Zola or Victor Hugo would certainly have spoken out for Pasternak, the New York. Left intellectuals found themselves impotent to do so, and consequently became irrelevant as a political and cultural group.

I myself recently published a book about American life in the 1950s, the argument of which is that the Fifties, so far from being dull, were rather exciting in a great variety of ways: My view is that those who say the Fifties were dull are merely culturalcliche kibitzers. I am pleased to say that the narrative evidence in Abel's book supports my own view of the Fifties (assuming such support were actually needed). Here is Abel on the atmosphere surrounding the Eighth Street school of "abstract expressionist" or "action" painters:

For my own part, I must say that the experience of ideas in the air is a very exciting one, and I think I can say, too, that the only time since the Thirties I have ever been aware of anything like this was during the Fifties in the art club and at the Cedar Bar . . . Probably the closest that we had to the Mermaid Tavern was the Algonquin Bar and Luchow's in the days of the American Mercury, and we certainly did not have cafes like the Flore or the Deux Magots or the grand cafes of Montparnasse frequented by writers and painters. But in the Fifties there was the Cedar. It was drab, grimy, and chaotic, but beneath the noise and the hum of conversation, the talk about art and by the artists--by Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Bill de Kooning, Spaventa . . . beneath all the talk and noise and often desperate remarks, there was an extraordinary optimism, quite American in fact, about painting, and most especially American painting.

This is an attractive book by a man who illuminates whatever he writes about, and who writes about important things.