HARP SONG FOR A RADICAL: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs, by Marguerite Young. Knopf, 599 pp.

The earliest writings of Marguerite Young, published in literary magazines of the 1930s and '40s, were poetry; but then so was all of her work. Even her book reviews have the feel of modernist performances -- episodes in "the revolution of the word," to invoke a slogan of the old literary avant-garde. Twenty years went into the composition of her novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965). A work of great complexity, and even greater length, it was denounced by critics as undisciplined and unreadable; yet other writers have come to admire it, near to the point of idolatry. In the years before her death in 1995, Young was a revered teacher and an eminence grise of Greenwich Village -- though she kept the grise concealed by a wig, which must have compounded the bohemian effect.

Ten years ago, in an essay for the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Young mentioned a project that had consumed her energies since the late 1960s: a narrative of the life and times of the beloved American socialist leader Eugene Debs (1855-1926), who got nearly a million votes for president while in jail for opposing World War I.

Young's comments on this work-in- progress indicate not only her understanding of the book, but the feel of her prose. It would be, Young wrote, "a three volume epic ... of which the canvas is the millennial or I should say the failed millennial continent of America with its most unusual fate, which was to be that of the lost earthly paradise to be restored by socialism in terms of man's quest for the perfect or almost perfect world -- the Jason's golden bough or tree of golden apples in the Garden of Eden sometimes glimpsed but not wholly discovered or restored."

The posthumous Harp Song for a Radical represents perhaps two-thirds of the epic Young had in mind. It is being offered to the public as a biography of Debs, which is a disservice to all parties involved, especially the reader, who will face difficulties enough  as it is. Roughly half the text consists of a footloose and somewhat fanciful account of radicalism in the United States during the 19th Century. The rest is focused on Debs in particular -- though "focused" may not be quite the word, since Young is a keen one for the woolly digression.

The narrative stops short of the crucial moment in 1894 when labor organizer Debs was imprisoned during the Pullman railway strike. That was when he read Marx's Capital. After almost 600 pages, we are still a long way from the founding of the American Socialist Party, much less Debs' emergence as a national figure. By my estimate, it would have taken Young another 2,000 pages to take him to the moment of his unforgettable declaration of 1918: "While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Young is a historian in roughly the sense Marcel Proust was a sociologist -- incidentally, quirkily, in no sense the profession would recognize, yet with a gift for rendering the facts at a revealing slant. But her lyrical prose does contain the elements of an argument. Harp Song is a poet's reply to a famous pamphlet by Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. For Engels (and many in his wake), radicalism falls into two big periods. First, various philanthropic reformers had drawn up blueprints to reorganize human society on moral lines. Their dreams were beautiful, though hardly tough-minded. Then came Karl Marx. Drawing on the most advanced concepts of German philosophers, British economists and French revolutionaries, Marx established the socialist movement on principles as scientific as chemistry. By contrast, the utopians had been mere alchemists -- trying to turn a base society into gold, by magic.

Young's heart is with the alchemists. And her picture of 19th- Century America is sprinkled with pieces of the philosopher's stone. She evokes the experiments in communal living launched by immigrant socialists, and the eccentric native religious movements proclaiming the arrival of a New Jerusalem in the New World. One recurrent theme is these radicals' efforts to invent a new universal language that would make communication among all people possible. Young weaves in countless, rather mystifying images involving birds -- especially their wings.

These poetic images form a sort of code. Like her visionaries, Young sees American socialism attended by a host of angels, preparing to usher in a New Age. A plausible guess is that important layers of meaning in Harp Song may be available only to readers familiar with "The Book of Mormon." (Young herself is a descendent of Brigham Young.) And the overlap in theme and imagery with Tony Kushner's Angels in America is, to use a theologically charged word, providential.

As a railway worker and unionist in the era of the robber barons, Debs shared Marx's hard-eyed appraisal of capitalism. But Young wants to show that the cultural legacy of non-Marxists infused his radicalism, too. "What was the distance between utopian speculations of any kind and the possibility of their attainment?" she muses. "And if there could be no actualization in reality within the framework of any individual's mortal life, should not the first steps still be taken upon a road that was long -- very long -- longer than the longest life there was?" The Marxist analysis held that capitalism must surely collapse. And soon. Hence Young's moral question is quite irrelevant (if not meaningless) to the "scientific socialist." Not so for the Debs portrayed in Harp Song.

This interpretation of Debs as utopian moralist seems to me sound, if a little one-sided. And I don't even mind it when the author has Marx publish a volume called Dialectical Materialism -- even though no such book exists, and the phrase "dialectical materialism" was coined by a Russian radical well after the German one was dead. But Young's aversion to linear storytelling -- her zigzags and magical realist touches - make "Harp Song" the last thing to read if you want to learn about Eugene Victor Debs. Instead, go find Ray Ginger's classic biography The Bending Cross (1949) - or J. Robert Constantine's monumental edition of Debs' letters.

In her essay 10 years ago, Young said she was writing "history as a poem or many poems linked by vast presumption of a logic linking the things which are visible with the things which are unseen and are made visible by the writer's quest." Her homage to Debs is precisely that: an epic prose poem. It is difficult to judge, for the author left it unfinished. Yet as Samuel Johnson said of Paradise Lost: Even those who like it could not wish it longer.