Book Review

MASTER OF ALL HE EXPLAINS

Raymond Rosenthal is a critic and translator. His most recent translations are of Pietro Citati's "Tolstoy" and Primo Levi's "Periodic Table.", Rosenthal, Raymond

1987

Overview

That is good and clear. But then political spite darkens his vision and he sees anti-Americanism in Mr. [Alfred Kazin]'s book ''An American Procession,'' with its subtle, equilibrated estimates of such writers as Melville, Emerson, Poe and Ezra Pound. Indeed, he berates Mr. Kazin for saying that Pound had deep political concerns that flawed his poetry, and he actually ignores the fact that Pound's violently political broadcasts for Fascist Rome led to his indictment for treason. Remonstrance is the form that most of Mr. [Lionel Abel]'s pieces take: rarely does he write directly about a writer he loves or detests; he is always correcting others, hauling them over the coals of logical analysis. And when he does write about a dear friend, Nicola Chiaromonte, the Italian critic, he can't control himself; the main import of this fond memoir is criticism of Chiaromonte, who, so Mr. Abel asserts, left a Paris dominated by Sartre's brilliance and fled to Rome, where he could nurse his wounded ego and receive a more flattering reception. BUT Mr. Abel leaves out a most interesting fact. Chiaromonte, in ''The Time of Bad Faith,'' a pamphlet written during the years Mr. Abel is talking about, wrote the most incisive analysis of Sartre's compulsive Stalinism. If there was a contest between them, particularly on the subject of politics, Chiaromonte won it hands down. Using Sartre's own writings on politics, in which he was admirably sincere about his motives and feelings, Chiaromonte drew a picture of the archetypal fellow traveler - the guilt-ridden bourgeois who stands desolately outside the Communist Party's gates and never joins but enjoys all the spiritual satisfactions of a nonreligious religion, the passionate partisan who continues year after year right to the very end to tell the inept party hacks how to provide Stalin's state terrorism with the most convincing credentials and intellectual arguments. Not that Mr. Abel is a Stalinist -Heaven forfend - but he has always been curiously protective of Sartre on this score, going to lengths in this book to prove that Sartre was a ''metaphysical Stalinist'' (and not to my mind proving it), when Sartre's writings on practical politics show him to have been a solid Stalinist.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: ABEL, LIONEL / ROSENTHAL, RAYMOND