Leon Trotsky (review)

Reviews Irving Howe, Leon Trotsky. New York: Penguin Books, 1979. 214 pp. $2.95. "None of the great Marxist figures," says Irving Howe of Trotsky, "lived so dramatic a life as he, none with so tragic a conclusion." One could not ask for a better brief summary of the main elements of Howe's small book, Leon Trotsky, which is one of the recent additions to the Modern Masters series edited by Frank Kermode. Whether Trotsky really belongs to that series, devoted to "the men who have changed and are changing the life and thought of our age" (lamentably the forty volumes to date have indeed all been written by men about men), remains a moot point which Irving Howe does not entirely answer. That Trotsky's actions in the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions and the Russian Civil War changed the life of our age cannot be doubted. But whether his influence now affects anything beyond the tiny left-wing groups that still call themselves Trotskyites and revere the "Old Man" 's memory is debatable. And how far Trotsky changes the thought of our age, as distinct from mere notions of political tactics, is equally so. Howe sets out to answer these questions , but ends by planting other questions in the reader's mind. The space at the disposal of writers in the Modern Masters series, between 160 and 200 pages, is insufficient for either a full biography or a full critical study. Each volume contains the basic facts of a life plus an exposition and analysis of what the subject has said and written ; the nature of the series presupposes that even the men of action it 78 biography Vol. 3, No. 1 includes—like Che Guevara and Lenin as well as Trotsky—have made some contribution to the mental world of their time. Some Modern Masters writers have handled their material in groups of essays on various aspects of the subjects' thought; Howe has chosen to link intellectual development to events, and divides his chapters according to the phases of Trotsky's life—phases intimately linked with changes in the revolutionary history of Russia and in the directions of Marxist theory. There is nothing really original biographically in what Irving Howe tells us, though he does succeed in projecting a sharper sense of Trotsky 's personality than emanates from the three ponderous and costive volumes of Isaac Deutschere major biography, The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast. Moreover, Howe's theoretical viewpoint is a great deal more open and flexible than that of Deutscher, an authoritarian socialist who could never really admit that—whatever one may say of Trotsky's errors—he was more often right than Stalin or grant what has long been evident to objective observers, that "Stalin's industrialization"—to quote Howe—"led to a new form of authoritarian collectivism, a repressive class society neither capitalist nor socialist." The bias of Deutschere biography, with its outdated concept of Stalinism as merely a socialism gone astray, long needed a corrective view, and in providing this Irving Howe has done us a real service. But no book is of lasting importance if its only virtue is that it effectively corrects another book, and we have to judge Howe's Leon Trotsky according to its success in presenting a new and different view. Howe has obvious qualifications for such a task. He writes at once eloquently and succinctly, and the very brevity that has been forced upon him by the optimum length of his book has resulted in writing that is simple, concise and at the same time very clear and vivid. Howe also has a range of literary knowledge that in the past enabled him to write good studies of Hardy and Faulkner as well as an important book on The Political Novel; thus he is well able to judge Trotsky's considerable talents as a writer. Finally, like many American writers of his generation, Howe had his brief young man's baptism by immersion into Trotskyism: "Almost four decades have passed since that youthful experience, and since then, even though or perhaps because I have remained a socialist, I have found myself...