Trotsky's Troubadours.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century - Book review

Daniel Oppenheimer, Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 416 pp., $28.00.

In his picaresque novel The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow has his youthful protagonist encounter Leon Trotsky and his entourage in Mexico outside a village church. Augie marvels, "it's stirring to have a glimpse of deepwater greatness. And, even more than an established, exiled greatness, because the exile was a sign to me of persistence at the highest things." It's an observation that reflects the fascination that Trotsky, the preeminent warrior intellectual, exerted upon his acolytes over the past century. Bellow, who wrote in the National Interest in 1993 that he absorbed Marxism "in the high-chair while eating my mashed potatoes," was himself a Trotskyist during his college years in the early 1930s at Northwestern University, along with many of his friends.

Indeed Bellow recounted that he had arranged to visit Trotsky in Coyoacan in 1940. The very morning of Bellow's appointment to meet him, however, Trotsky was murdered with an ice pick by Stalin's NKVD agent Ramon Mercader. Together with his friend Herbert Passin, Bellow traveled to the hospital where Trotsky had been taken:

His cheeks, his nose, his beard, his throat were streaked with blood and with dried iridescent trickles of iodine.... Now we understood what a far-reaching power could do with us; how easy it was for a despot to order a death; how little it took to kill us, how slight a hold we, with our historical philosophies, our ideas, programs, purposes, wills, had on the matter we were made of. Decades later, as a new generation fell under the spell of revolutionary upheaval, Bellow had nothing but contempt for the latest worshippers at the shrine of Marxism. As his bleak novels Mr. Sammler's Planet and The Deans December attest, he became something of a neoconservative. In 1994, after Bellow created an uproar by asking, "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?" he mocked his detractors in a New York Times op-ed by invoking memories of Stalinist campaigns against artists and intellectuals:

in any reasonably open society, the absurdity of a petty thought-police campaign provoked by the inane magnification of "discriminatory" remarks about the Papuans and the Zulus would be laughed at. To be serious in this fanatical style is a sort of Stalinism--the Stalinist seriousness and fidelity to the party line that senior citizens like me remember all too well. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It's a pity that Daniel...