Word: abell
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...crowded press conference in Washington last week, Brigadier General Richard Abel, public affairs director for the Air Force, announced a new set of restrictions on press coverage of manned space shuttle flights carrying purely military payloads. Mission 51-C is the first such flight; dozens more are scheduled in coming months and years. The aim of the new rules, declared General Abel, is to "deny our adversaries"-i.e., the Soviets-information about the shuttle launch and its payload. The effort to keep the lid on promptly provoked a rush of news leaks and reignited the simmering debate between the press...
...Lionel Abel, 73, is an essayist and playwright, and the latest veteran of New York City's old literary left to publish his memoirs. Other recent recollections of this once exclusive and fractious fraternity include Irving Howe's A Margin of Hope and William Barrett's The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals. They were, in Critic Harold Rosenberg's memorable phrase, "the herd of independent minds," part of the theory class that dominated political and cultural debate from the '30s through the '50s. Although deaths, dispersions and change have greatly reduced the group...
...Abel and the friends he cites in this amiably prescriptive work were major importers of mandarin goods. Coming of age in the '20s and '30s, these apprentice high brows were influenced by two intoxicating concepts from Europe: the power of the subconscious as expressed through psychoanalysis, and the possibilities for political change as revealed by Marxism...
...implied article of faith in Abel's reminiscences is that with the exception of Manhattan island, real life was best lived overseas. During the mid-'30s, one could battle for the moral high ground in the Spanish Civil War. After 1945 there was Paris, where one could mix with American writers, painters, musicians and, if Lionel Abel, lunch with the reigning philosopher of the left, Jean-Paul Sartre...
...Margin of Hope, Howe describes Abel as "a sort of freelance guerrilla ready to take on all comers." The Intellectual Follies is not as combative as this statement leads one to expect. The narrative adheres loosely to a chronology. Abel, son of a Niagara Falls rabbi, goes to Greenwich Village in 1929 to begin his literary venture. The Depression finds him there, receiving a weekly check from a federally sponsored writers' program. Many of the artists and litterateurs of the period had little affection for the hand that fed them; Abel notes with a twinkle that he stayed home...