Alexander Cockburn, who died in 2012, was an eccentric British journalist in the United States, famously insolent at The Village Voice during its years of glory in the 1970s and early 1980s and thereafter in other journals; and A Colossal Wreck is his posthumous book. The book came out late last year and aroused my curiosity because somehow I had gotten the impression that Cockburn had written an autobiography, which led me to remember that he did have talent and that his personal story was always more interesting than his opinions. The title itself, A Colossal Wreck, with its witty mix of the grandiose and the rueful, reminded me that, beneath his exterior appearance, Cockburn, the old rogue, could be wonderfully charming.

Only, a pity! Thirty seconds of flipping through the pages revealed the scale of my misunderstanding. The titular Wreck turns out to be, as I ought to have known, American imperialism, ever swinish, criminal, tawdry, and doomed. The book is merely a scrapbook of Cockburn’s railings in recent years against the Israel lobby, homosexuals, Democrats, liberals, and especially “Uncle Sam’s true face,” which is the CIA, Cockburn’s hobbyhorse: “Not a ‘rogue’ Agency but one always following the dictates of government, murdering, torturing, poisoning, drugging its own subjects, approving acts of monstrous cruelty, following methods devised and tested by Hitler’s men, themselves transported to America after World War II,” etc. More than five hundred pages of this seemed more than I could bear.

Still, many months later I have given A Colossal Wreck another try, and this time I note an attractive feature. At The Village Voice during Cockburn’s era, the big excitements, sometimes dwarfing the lowly questions of politics, tended to be countercultural, which prompted the rock critics and some of the other writers to erect giant amplifiers, as it were, and blast quotations from commercial movies and punk-band lyrics into the columns of the newspaper, as if Hollywood and the rockers defined the principles of a modern and suitable prose. Everyone was high on the “low.” Cockburn, by contrast, remained ensconced in a two-page column of his own called “Press Clips,” where the traditions of English literature appeared to be still in vogue, and he clung to tradition ever after. His Colossal Wreck draws its title from Shelley and goes on, in one passage or another, to invoke Browning and Conrad and Trollope and a dozen others, quite as if the English writers offered a fully adequate vocabulary for a modern conversation. As for Marxism—why, this appeared to be, for Cockburn, one more element within a civilized person’s home library: The Secret Agent on one shelf, The Eighteenth Brumaire on another.

Cockburn arrived in New York in the early 1970s, and it always seemed to me unfortunate that he never bothered to look into the principal Marxist or Marxist-influenced currents, past and present, of his new home. These were variously social-democratic and post-Trotskyist, and they differed from Marxist currents in certain other parts of the world because of their anti-totalitarian bent and also because of their origin in the city’s Jewish working class of a couple of generations before. The left-wing currents were entirely visible in New York in the ’70s and ’80s, and especially so at the Voice, where someone was always gazing in the direction of Dissent magazine; or at Dissent’s editor, Irving Howe, who happened to be the historian of the New York Jews; or at Howe’s stalwart comrade Michael Harrington, the socialist leader, who was himself a Voice writer. But New York’s political culture never grabbed Cockburn’s imagination.

His own Marxism was a product of the little world in London around the New Left Review in the 1960s—an Anglo-Marxism that had gotten its start in the 1950s by inching away from the British Communist Party, and after many years had failed to inch very far. Anglo-Marxism, in his presentation, looked on the Soviet Union as a gray and uninteresting place, which, by lending support to Third World liberation struggles in the remote tropics and hotlands, nonetheless served as the powerhouse of social progress. And Anglo-Marxism, in Cockburn’s version, looked upon the United States as the corrupt and hypocritical center of a doomed imperialism, filled with pitiable victims and with anonymous noble resisters who were all too prone to fall prey to the corruptions of imperial life. This was not a subtle picture of the world.