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That "the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity"'1-Yeats's conclusion early in this century-continues to apply, although now the best are bigger wimps, and the worst are more murderous. To Robert Stone, the disintegration of a viable left apparently figures in this decline. Standing at the center of nearly every Stone novel is a marginalized character who may once have identified with the left but then lost faith, turned cynical, yet remains conversant with left-wing issues. These characters are political junkies, often literally, who have become dysfunctional, perhaps because Stone places them in an intellectual and spiritual climate that undermines the foundations of identity-belief in history, belief in the self, belief in coherent morality-on which virtuous political action might be postulated.
Stone, obviously a student of modern political movements, peppers his novels with allusions to the left, some things easily recognized: the civil rights movement, the Spanish Civil War, the McCarthy era, the words of the Internationale, Paul Robeson, Fidelistas, Trots, and Maoists; others more obscure: Lovestonites and Stakhanovites, Sidney Hillman and Daniel De Leon. He and his characters must believe this history worth knowing. Sometimes the left of times past inspires; usually the left of the present wallows in ambiguity. Occasionally Stone treats an old-school Marxist with seeming admiration, for example, a revolutionary named La Torre (A Flag for Sunrise), who despises those he sees "as living without working," and is "`the personification of every Marxian insight."'2 But such appreciation is qualified, since La Torre is so true as to be a "vulgarization."
Finally indeed, all present-day leftists are "vulgarizations of history," since "`life, unlike sound philosophy, is vulgar"' (207). Past and present popular causes, the Spanish civil war or Central American uprisings, remain impure compounds, embracing in their revolutionary movement bourgeois elements along with religious fanatics who aim to install the just rule of the Lord. For Stone ideology is always effaced by living history. In fact, Stone says he cares little for ideologues, regarding them as "poison toad(s)," who invoke a "verbal machine." He bases his politics instead on the only morality there is, "me and the universe,"3a doctrine of personal responsibility separate from causes. But the individual protagonist in this duo, for example, Holliwell in A...