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ONE of the hideous paradoxes of our time is that those American exCommunists who had treason to confess to and could denounce their fellow traitors are now regarded, in some quarters, as paragons of virtue; whereas those onetime Party members who were not so fanatical as to become entrapped in the underground, and who therefore have nothing sensational to reveal, are incapable of proving, to Senator McCarthy’s satisfaction, that they are not still Communists. A case in point is James A. Wechsler, 38-year-old editor of the New York Post, whose horrible but victorious encounter with the Senator’s Investigating Committee prompted him to write his political testament: The Age of Suspicion (Random House, $3.75).

The first part of the book is a frank and at times wryly amusing account of Wechsler’s youthful involvement with Communism as a Columbia student in the mid-thirties. The second part describes his subsequent newspaper career and antiCominunist activities. The third section is perhaps the most unchallengeable indictment of McCarthy’s methods that has appeared to date, for never before have the facts and issues been quite so clear-cut.

Mr. Wechsler has frequently acknowledged in print that he was a member of the Youth Communist League from the age of eighteen to twenty-two; and some years back he made a detailed statement of his past connections to the F.B.L Since he broke away from the Party in 1937, Wechsler has established an imposing record as a militant anti-Communist. While working on PM, he was active in the struggle against the pro-Communist clique on the paper and against Communists within the Newspaper Guild: the Daily Worker has time and again assailed him as a “red-baiter.” His fighting stand against Communism as editor of the New York Post is easily verified, and his editorial on the Hiss case elicited the congratulations of Richard Nixon.

Wechsler was summoned by the McCarthy Committee ostensibly because books he had written had been found in USIS libraries abroad; but the Committee was unable to identify the books, and the title mentioned by McCarthy to the press was strongly anti-Communist. The Senator, moreover, did not contest Wechsler’s record of anti-Communism; he blandly asserted that there was no better way of serving Communism than to acquire a record such as Wcchsler’s.

McCarthy hinged his charges that Wechsler was a Communist on two sinister fantasies: namely, that anyone who criticizes McCarthy is a supporter of Communism, and that the only way of establishing that a real break with Communism has been made is to denounce someone not hitherto proved to be a Communist.

Wechsler’s conduct before the Committee made it impossible for McCarthy to brand him an uncoöperative witness, and the Senator’s naked attempt to intimidate one of his most effective critics ended in failure. Nevertheless, Wechsler’s stirring and important story dramatizes only too forcibly that the spread of knownothingness has become our gravest political threat.

The Psychology of Art by André Malraux has recently made a fresh appearance in a widely revised, greatly enlarged, and much improved version entitled The Voices of Silence (Doubleday, $25.00). This is a work that will endure: a work rich in the fruits of a brilliant, probing mind, a dynamic imagination, and a profoundly sensitive response to the art of all ages and cultures. It is a book full of beauty — the 465 reproductions are of superb quality, and they are rewardingly integrated with the text. It is also a difficult book, for Malraux deploys a phenomenal erudition with the assumption that his reader is similarly equipped; he compresses into a flashing sentence what calls for a paragraph; and his exposition is more passionate than orderly.

The Roman coin, the Oriental carpet, the sculpture of the Druses, the prow of a Viking ship, have their place in this panoramic study of the nature and function of art. Art works far removed from each other in time and space are continually drawn together, and our awareness of their similarities and differences is sharpened and enlarged.

The first, part of the book explores the theme that photography has brought into being a “Museum Without Walls”; for the first time mankind has access, through reproductions, to almost the entire realm of art. This, Malraux argues, has altered our concept of what constitutes a masterpiece: the artist’s supreme work is not his most “finished” but his most personal, the one in which his style reaches its climax.

Malraux then traces the evolution of modern art and defines its special character. He starts off from the familiar premise that the artist does not reproduce reality but transforms it according to a given scheme of values. In the art of the past, says Malraux, the transformation of forms was governed by a religious credo, or an ideal of beauty, or, in the Baroque, a wish to achieve “sublime theater.” The modern artist, he claims, has had a unique insight into the essence of art. Rejecting extra-aesthetic values, unreconciled to his culture, but refusing to accept chaos, he seeks to create his own individual universe.

Parts II and III are concerned with stylistic influences and the creative process. A style, to Malraux, is the badge of a culture. Each style is the product of a revolt against a previous style, for the artist is not inspired by nature but by the artists who have preceded him: “It is not the sight of a supremely beautiful woman but a supremely beautiful painting that launches a painter on his career.” The final section returns to modern art and elaborates the thesis that, in this age of negation and despair, art is a sort of substitute religion.

Archaeologist, soldier of fortune, onetime Communist, wartime Resistance leader, novelist, philosopher, and right-hand man of de Gaulle, Malraux, throughout his career, has been obsessed with the problem of man’s fate. This concern is the energizing force behind The Voices of Silence. The book substantiates the thesis that, through art, civilizations do not altogether die but transmit a heritage; through the work of art man speaks with an undying voice.

At bottom, The Voices of Silence is a passionate attempt to assert a humanist absolute. Malraux finds this absolute in the creative process: he sees the creative process as a salvation in itself, a “conquest” of man’s fate. It wrenches man from the world in which he must submit to insignificance and death, and enables him to enter a world of which he is the ruler. It is the triumph of the Human over the Absurd.

Simone de Beauvoir, who made quite a splash last year with Lite Second Sex, visited the United States for four months in 1947, and the book which resulted from this trip has now belatedly been published in English: America Day by Day (Grove, $4.00). Mile, de Beauvoir’s diary contains a fair amount, of provocative comment and a certain number of telling critical insights along with surface impressions — some sharp, many downright silly — and sweeping generalizations which run the gamut from banality to bosh. Though often hugely irritating, this existentialist’s-eye view of the American scene is lively reading.

Looking at New York “with the astonishment of a blind man who has iust got back his sight,” Mlle. de Beauvoir was enchanted by the “delirious geometry” of the skyscrapers. The Third Avenue El, she found, was “like a tender memory.” American women, however, shocked her by the “violently feminine character” of their clothes, which she took as distressing evidence of their “servility” to men.

Mlle, de Beauvoir went West and liked the wide, open spaces. The gardens of Charleston struck her as the most beautiful she had ever seen. But an unconscionably large part of her sightseeing was devoted to the seamier side of life, which seems to hold a hypnotic attraction for the pious existentialist. She lingered, fascinated, in the Bowery; attended a marijuana party in a New York hotel: spent the greater part of her first brief stay in Chicago savoring the slums; sought out the tougher sort of night club in most of the towns she visited. She went to trashy movies, spent night after night listening to jazz, and dutifully cultivated a taste for whisky: for jazz, whisky, and trashy movies were the keys with which she hoped to enter into American experience.

Among the credit items, there are good passages on the isolation of the writer in America; on the sterility and psychoses of some of our exCommunist intellectuals; on the unparalleled creativity and the ubiquitous escapism, the enthusiasm and the emptiness, that coexist in American life. The pages which remind us that Simone de Beauvoir has a first-rate mind make it doubly exasperating that what she was most eager to find and most ready to be charmed by should have been those aspects of American life celebrated in tough-guy novels, movies about the underworld, westerns, and the mystique of jazz,

The Greek Passion (Simon & Schuster, $4.00), which arrives with tributes from Thomas Mann and Albert Schweitzer, is the second novel to be published in the United States by Nikos Kazantzakis, whose Zorba the Greek was well received last year. The setting is a small Greek village in Turkish Anatolia after the First World War, and the plot is derived from the Christian Passion Story.

The destitute survivors of a Greek village sacked by the Turks arrive in Lycovrissi seeking asylum. But the prosperous Elders angrily refuse them succor, and they march off into the barren mountains.

Lycovrissi has just selected the cast that will perform the Passion Play the following year, and those chosen to portray the Holy Ones begin to feel a change within themselves, a desire to live up to their roles in the Passion. The Christ, the gentle shepherd Manolios — after being tested by a loathsome disease and proving his faith — joins the refugees and sets out to be their savior. The Apostle John, son of the village’s wealthy leader, tries to turn over his land to the unfortunates. The Apostles Peter and James—one a nottoo-honest peddler, the other owner of a cafe — follow in the footsteps of Manolios. The Mary Magdalen, the village prostitute, after failing to seduce Manolios, becomes filled with his faith and gives her life to save others. But those seeking to act in the spirit of Christ provoke the fury of the selfish; and savage turmoil takes hold of Lycovrissi.

Mr. Kazantzakis is unquestionably a writer with large creative powers. His novel is thickly peopled with vivid, strikingly individual characters; his storytelling is dexterous, flowing, and richly inventive; his touch is both vigorous and tender. Some readers will find this novel a refreshingly different product from most contemporary fiction, and some will find it a bit old-fashioned for their taste. For better or for worse, The Greek Passion has the flavor of a parable enlarged to epic dimensions.