A Long Journey

A Long Journey

Lionel Abel is a witty and cultivated man who has participated in or observed at close hand many of the past four decades’ important art movements and intellectual currents. His political involvement also goes back a long way: he was a committed Trotskyist until 1941, when he rejected the Fourth International’s position on the Second World War. A left-liberal for many years afterward, he says things in this book that sound a lot like neoconservatism. (In  November he voted for Reagan. He briefly explains his reason for doing this in the 50th-anniversary issue of the Partisan Review.)