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In a review of the book in The New York Times, John Gross noted that some of the material was familiar. \"Yet [LIONEL ABEL] never leaves you with the feeling that you have heard it all before,\" he wrote. In a 1965 column in The New York Herald Tribune, Dick Schaap wrote: \"Sartre says Abel is the most intelligent man in New York City. Kenneth Rexroth, the poet-critic, says Abel is the most intelligent man in New York City.

[Lionel Abel] was best known for his play \"Absalom,\" which told the tale of King David's two-year struggle to decide which of his sons would succeed him - [Absalom] or David. The play was awarded an Obie for best play of the 1956 Off-Broadway season.

[Lionel Abel] was best known for his play \"Absalom,\" which told the tale of King David's struggle to decide which of his sons...

In his 1984 memoir, \"The Intellectual Follies,\" [Lionel Abel] revisited his early days living in New York City's Greenwich Village among people such as Joe Gould and Maxwell Bodenheim, and his later years when he was friendly with abstract expressionist...

Indeed, many readers may shrink a little at the prospect of one more account of Trotskyist tactics in the 1930's, or exactly what it was that Dwight Macdonald said to Harold Rosenberg in 1943, or the furor occasioned by Hannah Arendt's ''Eichmann in Jerusalem.'' Yet Mr. [Lionel Abel] never leaves you with the feeling that you have heard it all before. He is too independent and effervescent for that; his mind goes off on too many unexpected tangents. After the war Mr. Abel spent three years in Paris, and French intellectual life looms large in his story. The only writer who gets a chapter to himself in the book is Jean-Paul Sartre. Mr. Abel knew him well (he translated his play ''Dirty Hands'') and admired him greatly, though on this side idolatry - he doesn't hesitate to recall some of his more egregious political pronouncements. Nor does he gloss over the shortcomings of his other Parisian friends. The most attractive portrait he paints is of a Russian-born Italian savant called Andrea Caffi, a man whom he convincingly presents as courteous, large- minded, immensely civilized; but we end up with Caffi, in a sudden fit of pique, insulting an old friend with breathtaking brutality. By the end of the 50's, Mr. Abel had begun to feel his world was breaking up. The gathering where this was first borne in on him was an attempt to organize a letter to the Soviet authorities protesting their treatment of Boris Pasternak, which was immediately blown off-course by Paul Goodman's first announcing that he had no intention of reading ''Dr. Zhivago'' - ''Pasternak can read me'' - and then claiming that it would be in bad faith to protest, since those present had done nothing about the refusal of a movie theater in Hicksville, L.I., to show a recent Charlie Chaplin film. The 1960's, it is clear, were just around the corner.

In a review of the book in The New York Times, John Gross noted that some of the material was familiar. ''Yet Mr. [Lionel Abel] never leaves you with the feeling that you have heard it all before,'' he wrote. ''He is too independent and effervescent for that; his mind goes off on too many unexpected tangents.'' Among Mr. Abel's other books was ''Important Nonsense'' (Prometheus Books), a 1987 collection of essays about writers like Dostoyevsky, Bertrand Russell, Jean Genet, Edmund Wilson, Arthur Koestler and Jean-Paul Sartre. Mr. Abel was Sartre's authorized translator.

Actually, [Lionel Abel] is superbly positioned to tell a considerable part of the cultural story of his times. In the '30s, he fell under the sway of Trotsky and worked on the WPA's Writers Project. During the war years, he traveled in New York emigre circles frequented by the Surrealists: Matta, Andre Breton, Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell. (The latter two would gravitate to Abstract Expressionism; Abel would rub elbows with that crowd, too.) With the end of the war, existentialism began its vogue - and Abel was involved. By 1948 he was living in Paris, where he would remain until 1951. His acquaintances there included Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Alberto Giacometti and Albert Camus. As Abel describes it, the Left Bank of that time was a world of wonders (one made wondrous not least by the dollar's purchasing power) where good talk, friendship and bracing controversy all flourished. The tendency to abstraction that fogs so much of \"The Intellectual Follies\" recedes here under the enlivening influence of Saint- Germain-des-Pres.

These essays are replete with marvelous vignettes of major creative personalities, including the Surrealists' leader Andre Breton, who looked so ''noble'' and ''never failed to take the subjunctive as required,'' but whose fingers were ''huge enough to seem quite monstrous'' and who was given to ''sudden extraordinary rages.'' [Lionel Abel]'s friend [Matta] could light up a room with his humor. But he fell in love with Arshile Gorky's wife, for which Gorky threatened him in a bizarre meeting in Central Park. Later, when the proto-Abstract Expressionist committed suicide, Matta, the Surrealist, not only felt no remorse, but exulted in ''a sacrifice which had made possible'' the ecstasy he enjoyed with the widow. He said Surrealism ''had taught sadism and even insisted on it,'' but, as Mr. Abel notes, there was apparently a difference between ''support for sadism as an ideology'' and a dependence on it in fact, for the affair was short-lived and Matta came close to nervous collapse. MR. ABEL'S opinion is that Surrealism was not a symptom of its exponents' ''moral ambiguity'' but the cause of it, and that it was related to ''an ambiguity about spontaneous creation'' which they ''refused to try to clarify.'' A similiar literal-mindedness marks a sketch of the young Robert Motherwell, who Abel assumes was ''blind to his own rather Saxon blondness'' when he said that ''Anglo- Saxon painters lack pictorial imagination'' - as if awareness of one's background precludes criticism of one's own race. Mr. Abel is probably right when he says the artist wouldn't speak so ''imprecisely'' today, but it's more than a little patronizing to suggest that the generalization (which contains more than a germ of truth) reflected the ''influence over him at the time of the surrealist painters, mainly Latins.'' WHEN TALK MATTERED MORE To the quibble that he didn't talk personally in his own memoirs, ''The Intellectual Follies,'' Lionel Abel said with a grin, ''You mean I didn't talk about women. If I could have written the book without mentioning myself, I would have.'' In his Upper East Side living room, Mr. Abel, who will be 74 on Nov. 28, spoke of contrasts - his past to the present. ''We did a lot of talking in those years, and I think something did come of it. Let's take the painters. The movement in 1948 into the 50's, Abstract Expressionism, gave this country the foremost position it had ever had in art. This was partly due to the quality of the painters and to the fact that they saw each other regularly. ''Today in literature, much less is going on of real interest. This is the first generation of no French novelists or playwrights of vigor. There are few interesting writers today in England, when we think of Auden and Woolf. In Russia, anybody important they send to the gulag or throw out. Literature is not pursued as brilliantly in this country as in the 20's. It was once believed that art was properly pursued only by those who had talent. Now art is an objective for everybody. It is a human goal today to be a novelist.'' -

\"Tragedy and Metatheatre: Essays On Dramatic Form,\" by Lionel Abel, is reviewed (Holmes & Meier, 2003).