Out of the Waxworks

THE GREAT PRINCE DIED (398 pp.)--Bernard Wolfe--Scribner ($4.50).

The life and death of Leon Trotsky, a kind of Marxist Macbeth, have been made into a novel by U.S. Author Bernard (The Late Risers, In Deep) Wolfe, who was one of Trotsky's aides in the years before the inevitable assassin caught up with him in his Mexico hideaway.

On some principle by which the names have been changed to protect the guilty, Leon Trotsky, whose real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein, in this novel is called Victor Rostov. But there is no doubt that the book is about the chess-playing, intellectual Commissar of War (1918-25) who lost his long struggle for power with Stalin. Trotsky became the grand heretic of a religion whose god is the state; it was his peculiar hell that he never ceased to believe in the religion that had made him its principal devil.

Strange Household. When Author Wolfe, newly out of Yale, first encountered him in January 1937, Trotsky had just joined Mexico's impressive gallery of grotesques, and later did, in fact, figure in Mexico City's waxworks museum (wearing tweed knickerbockers), along with Emperor Maximilian and Mahatma Gandhi. Author Wolfe's version of Trotsky is itself a kind of waxworks figure (the writing sounds as if Ernest Hemingway were trying to parody Gromyko), but the book has the great merit of pointing to Trotsky's moral dilemma: Would he have used power less ruthlessly than Stalin?

Author Wolfe claims that his story, which turns on two attempts on Trotsky's life, follows the facts. The account of the assassination relies on General Sanchez Salazar, Mexican chief of secret police, whose Murder in Mexico established beyond much doubt that the man who murdered Trotsky was in fact a Stalinist agent. Wolfe's picture is drawn against the background of what must have been one of the strangest households in the world--young bodyguards filling sandbags and filing correspondence for revolution's exiled royalty. About the house in Coyoacan, six miles south of Mexico City, was the sour smell of defeat and the constant whine of grandiose self-justification.

Toward the end, Trotsky's life became a charade of frustration and fear, and Wolfe's melodramatic style is well suited to convey the unreality of it all. Trotsky liked to say that the snowy volcanoes he could see from his windows were not extinct but dormant. But could the Red Napoleon really believe that his walled house was an Elba, not a St. Helena? He had tasted power, and missed it so much that he was delighted when simple Mexicans thought of him as a prince who had fallen (hence Wolfe's title).

Sentimental Legend. Some of this involves the novel in dense thickets of Marxist homiletics. But two things in Wolfe's fictional chronicle are intriguing in human terms. One is the sense of Trotsky-Rostov's real devotion to his wife. The other is his personal gentleness and charm. He kept pet rabbits (one was called George Sand), which had been bought to give the household its own supply of meat, but which, when it came to the point, the author of The Defense of Terrorism could not bear to have killed.

Author Wolfe, self-described as "a Democratic Socialist," thus comes to grips with the sentimental legend that still clings to Trotsky. According to that legend, Stalin was the sole villain who turned a dream of socialism into a nightmare. Trotsky never accepted the fact that he himself could not have administered Bolshevism without the Lubianka Prison or the Vorkuta slave camp. He blandly overlooks the large collection of skeletons in his own closet: the uncounted thousands of "sailor-comrades" killed by order of Lenin and Trotsky during the Kronstadt naval mutiny of 1921.

Author Wolfe pictures his hero nagged by the guilt of Kronstadt. While Trotsky could see that the regime did not represent a new civilization but "a vertical invasion of the barbarians," he would not see himself as one of the barbarians.

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