Abel Intellectual Follies - A Memoir of the Lite Raryventure in New York & Paris

When the author is nearly nineteen, he finds himself in the vicinity of Washington Square and is introduced to Maxwell Bodenheim by Lionel Stander. It is 1929. Walking through the village, Joe Gould is found, and then the poet, Kenneth Fearing. Abel moved between Greenwich Village and his parents place on Long Island. When he entered into a contract to translate the poems of Rimbaud he rented a room on Charles Street. Abel had attended St. John's University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His father's job as a rabbi in Niagra Falls was a casualty of the Great Depression. He relates that in the thirties, after a party or a meeting, one was frequently given a book to read. He believes that because of the problems people faced in the economic crisis, they began to ask themselves Russian questions, i.e. Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky. With the advent of the WPA program, the lines of people seeking bread vanished and the city itself became polished. There was real change. In 1933 Abel began to write for THE NATION. Philip Rahv and William Phillips moved THE PARTISAN REVIEW away from the Communist Party. Next the magazine added Dwight Macdonald, Clement Greenberg, Delmore Schwartz, and William Barrett to the staff. Rahv, Phillips, and Abel were in the WPA Writers' Project. NYC writers were embroiled in the Stalin-Trotsky controversy. The author connects the Abstract Expressionists with the Surrealist artists. The Surresliasts stood for cyncism. Andre Breton insisted that games were important. Surrealists exalted suicide. Marcel Duchamp attended a lecture by Jean-Paul Sartre in NYC with the author in 1948. Sartre lectured at Carnegie Hall. Sartre was productive from the end of the Spanish Civil War through the late seventies. Abel asserts that through and through he was an intellectual. Sartre placed politics above art. At the Cedar Bar in the village, ideas were in the air, (1950's). It was filled with painters. When Paul Goodman and others wanted to sabotage the efforts of the author and others to protest the action of the Russian government in seeking to deny Pasternak the Nobel Prize, it became evident that the New York intellectuals were no longer a group. I love this book. It moves through time and place-- Paris is included with Greenwich Village-- in its lively descriptions of writers, artists, and philosophers.