Books: The Old Red Mare

INFIDEL IN THE TEMPLE by Matthew Josephson. 513 pages. Knopf. $8.95.

Another old intellectual war horse of the '30s has run in the Marx Memorial Handicap and pulled up lame but far from winded after 513 grueling pages.

Matthew Josephson, now 68, is perhaps best remembered for his muckraking classic, The Robber Barons, a gallery of the "malefactors of great wealth" who dominated the second half of the 19th century in the U.S. The theme was full of pay dirt for the propagandist, but Josephson, one of the few radicals who had any notion of how American business actually worked, wrote with authority. Infidel in the Temple is an attempt to evoke the spirit of the Depression years, but the effect is only that of an endless documentary spliced from old newsreels, with a commentary by the author explaining that he was there.

Once again, "Iron-Pants" Johnson rides to Washington, once again the Byzantine intrigues of the Communists and of the non, near-and anti-Communists are uncoiled. One learns that Karl Marx had whiskers and that Roosevelt looked poorly in 1944, that Communists are devious and that—etc. It would tax the attention span of a U.N. stenographer.

Only once or twice does the account come to life, when Josephson deals with some noted figures who were touched by the grandeurs and miseries of the '30s. He has Edmund Wilson darkly prophesying that come the revolution, some intellectual enemy would "be done away with." Whittaker Chambers makes the scene as a malevolent monster who framed a guiltless Hiss, and John Dos Passes is treated with oblique sneers. Chambers and Dos Passos had been vehemently for, and later, vehemently against Communism, and this perhaps is what disturbs Josephson. No Comrade Quixote, he was happily embraced by the New Deal bureaucracy, and remained a puzzled neutral in the ideological warfare of the time.