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Home , Dwight Macdonald

Dwight Macdonald: sunburned by ideas by Joseph Epstein

At a rg80 symposium at Skidmore College tagious. Answering a reader wvho accused set in mrotion by a normally portentous him of taking a sniide tone in an article essay by George Steiner about the death of 011 the Ford Foundation in The Nrew Yorker culture in America, Dwight Macdonald, in I954, he put the blame for the article's long established as a slashing critic of pop- tone on himself, writing: "after all, I've Lar cuilture and politics, sitting on a panel done a lot of 'snide' writing in my time, on "Film and Theatre in Anerica,' seemed [anid] am indeed rather an SOB, on paper to have little of interest to say. He was at lcast?' seventy-four years old and a fairly serious I once greatly admired D-wight Macdon- boozer who had written almost nothing of ald, and I esteemed precisely that uinforgiv- interest for more than a decade. He seemed ing, relentless SOB side of him above all. As the intellcctual equiivalenit of the boxer who a graduate of Mencken University. with a has taken way too many shots to the head. major in what I took to be anti-BS and a His death by congestive heart failure was minor in , I thought Mac- tvo years away. Reacting against the ten- donald, when I first came across his writing dency in the discussion to take a-Lrrent-day in the late 195oS, ncxt in succession to 1H. L. mo-ies and plays seriously, Macdonald Mencken himsclf. To read Macdonald on emitted- one almost hears him muttering t-he barbarity of General George S. P'atton, -a remark that could stand as the epigraph the goofy gadgetrv of Mortimer J. Adler's for hlis long career in journalism: Syntopicon to the Great Books, the depre- "LVOThe1e I say 'no' I'm always right and -when dations upon the King James Bible com- I say 'yes' I'm almost alwvavs wrong" mitted by its new English translators w^as to Dwight Macdonald was the intellectual hear melodious bells go off and have the sky par excellence, whichi is to say without any fill with firewvorks. specialized knowledge he was prepared to Macdonald got away with muclh that ,he comment on everthing, boisterously and did through style. The trick of this style was always with what seemed an unwavering to be sharp and intimate simultaneously. He confidence. He was the pure type of the wrote to a correspondent that the secret to amateur, and gloried in the status. And why successfiUl lecturing was to speak as if talking not? "What's wrong with leing an ama- to no more than three or four people, and teur," one easily imagines him saying. "Look he seemed to write the same way. His gen- wvhere the professionals have got us." eral tone was that of the unconnable ad- Perhiaps this is too mucl in the spirit of dressing the already highly skeptical. He put-down. But then this was also Macdon- never condescended to his readers, assum- ald's reigning spirit, and possibly it is con- ing that they were on his intellectual level.

The Newv Criterion NToPember 2001 252 Dwighlt Macdoniald by Joscpb Fpstein

A brilliant counterpuncher, specializing in Lucc's inew mnagazilne, devoted to chronii- mockery of his opponents, he wrote un- cling the high romance of in;dustry an:id shapely essays in whiclh the best thingias were commerce. He spoke well of Luce per- often to be found in ungainly asterisk foot- sonally- thoulgh often m1ockin1g h£im, once notes. His witticisms seemned truth-bearin-g. referring to him as "Il I aLce"8-but Timec 'IThe first sentence of his article on the Ford Inc. was a persistent force for evil in the Founidation ran: "The Ford Foundation is culture drama that played in Macdonald's a large body of money completely sur- hcad. "For fourteen years." he wrote of his rounded by people who want somce frienld , "like ana elephant learn- ing to deplcoy a parasol, Agec devoted his Born in 1906, the soTn of a father who was prodigioLus gifts to Lucean journialism:' a lawyer and a n other with s(ocial preten- Feeling lirmself stifled by working for sions, Dwight iMacdonald was by back- Fortune, Macdonald, with twvo Yale class- ground upper-middle class. He was a prep mates, Frecd Dlupee and George L. K. Mor- school boy (Exeter) and an Ivy League iman ris, began, as a moonlghting venture, a (Yale), whose first job out of school was in magazirie calledMvisrelany, a bimonthly that the executive training program at Macy's. lasted niearly tvo years. Througzh Dupee he Yet straight out of the gate he was a rebel, wvas put in touch with Philip RLahv and Wil- antagonizer division. At Exeter, at fourteen, liam Phillips, who had recently removed the he and a frienid formed a group called The nagazine Partisan Revien', out from unider Hedonists, vhose motto was "epater tes the Stalinist sway of the John Reed Club, baurgeois." Altlhough as a young man he and -were lookinig for financial supporters to held many of the prejudices of his social keep it alive. Along with Dupee anid Morris, dass-racism, anti-Semitism-a strong be- Macdonald became one of the magazine's lief in religion was not among themi. "Liter- five principal editors. ature and knowledge, wisdom and wnder- Macdoonald had been driftirg leftward. standing, intellect, call it what y0ou will, is "Marx goes to the heart of t'he problem;" he my religion:" These woyuld be the gods he wrote to a college classmate ini I936. To the worshipped ail his life. samne man he wrote: "I'm growing more "I have a prose mind,' the young Dwight and more intolerant of those who stand-or Macdonald wrote in college. "1 want to rath-er squat-in the way of radical progress, Write serious criticism:' At irst, though, he the mrore I learn about the conservative was swept away by the vigor of businessmen, businesses that run this country and the whoim he found "wvere keenier, more effi- more I see of the injustices done people cient, more sure of their power than any col- under this horrible cap-italist svstem.' Earlier lege prof I ever knexw' Upon discovering hle hie had noted that "my greatest vice is nmy had n10 mind for bush ess, he took up a n0o- easily aroused indignation-also, I suppose, tion he found in readiing Spengler: that there one of m-.y greatest strengtlhs. I cani work up w'ere MAen of Truths and Men of Action, and a mora i ndigiiationi quicker thian a fat ten- he was clearny among the formner. Even then nis player can xvork up a swTeat? Over the he liked to have an idea-not vet ar, ideol- vears his similes would improve, if not his ogy-in support of at y move he made. temperamenit. Macdonald's next step was to a job at By the time he was thirty, Macdonald was Time nagazine, which he got through a Yale filily formied, in-tellectually and emotionally. classmate. , on- of the two Politically, he was anti-Stalinist and anti- fo'unders of Ti7te, was hirnself a Yalie, and statist vet also anti-capitalist, In the 1936 for many years Yale functioned as a farn president al electoion, he voted for Earl team of sorts for Time, Inc. Macdonald Browder, tihe Communist candiidate. For a began by writing finan-ie and businiess few years he was a member of the 'Trotskyite stories, and soon was transferred to Foaurtue, WNorker Party. But he had only to join a

26 The New Criterion November 2001 Dwight Macdonald byJoseph Fpstein

group to find it objectionable and thus left A vorazl r7 anper is fiLled with amusing and the Workers Party in 194i. Trotsky himself interesting material, some of it unknown to had referred to him as a "Macdonaldist?" (In me, -who has long felt glutted with accounts an article left in his dictaphone mnachine of the . I knew that before his death, he describcd a -Macdonald Macdonald's wvife Nancy had served as bus- piece as "very muddled and stupid?') lM7ac- iness manager-the unkniowin soldicr of donald always took the high road-that most little magazines-of Partisan Revieiv, "morat indignation" again-preferrinig clar- but I dtidn't know that for a good spell ity over complexity in politics and keeping a much of the daily dr-udgery of briniginig out palette restricted to two colors, black and the magazine fell to the Macdonalds, in white, with very little interest in gray shad- whose Tenth Street Village apartment it wvas iings or texture of any sort. His un-willing- actually produced. At one point Macdonald ness to grant America tlhe least virtue led wished to do aw,ay with Dupee and William himn to m--ake somne impressively idiotic Philips as members of the editorial board statemen-ts, notable among them:`"vuropc and replace them with Harold Rosenberg hlas its Hitiers, but we ha.e our Rotarians?" and Clement Greenberg. Macdoniald felt He settlcd into a lifelong bumptiousness. that the magazine, bogged dowIn in "Raiv's His ton1e and spirit were heavily polemical. cautiotus negativistic policies," had becomc This was not helped by his drinking, which n0 noore than a periodical anthology, did not tend to make himn more courtly. The publishing the best things scnt to it, which ultimate art form of the mav have had its uses, "but it's not the sort crowd may have been the go-scrcw-yourself of magazine I would want to give any large letter, which they were a-ways sending one amount of titne to right now' another: choice examples of Macdonald's What Macdonal3d xvanted was a more use of the form are found in A Moral directly political magazine thanl Partisan Temper, a new collection put together by his Review. He was hinmself becoming evcr more 1 biographer Michael Wreszin. These were radicalized. He had turned into a mad letter letters written not to disable but to maiam. wvriter, sending off littlc blasts to John In a milder varianit on the form, Deimore Dewey, James B. Conway, Freda Kirchswey, Schwartz wrote to Macdonald: and othcrs, among them a letter to Ediund Wilson upbraiding him for not publicly at- I alxvavs defend vou among academnics and the tacking Malcohn Cowley for his gelnteel (two of your curse words . . . ) by and Van WVck Brooks for his iisistenIIce on sayving: Yes anitagonism for its owni sake is hfis patriotism from American wnriters. appetite and neur-osis, and none of his political Finally, in July of 1943, Macdonald re- predictions come true, but he is a master of signed from PartisanRevieew, remarking that expository. prosc . .. and he opens himself up "the divergence is mainly political.' He also to all kinds of being and beinigs, Open House had cultural objections to the drift of the Macdonald ought to be his name. journal. He felt that in its cultural coverage the magazine "has become rather academic," Macdonald slhot back: "In future, do me a where he favored "a more infornmal, disrc- favor and either keep siienit or join the spectable, and chance-taking magazine, with Enemyv" and xvent on to chide Schwartz for a broader and less exclusive 'literary' ap- not aving "the guts to spea out on any- proach?' He clailned that lis w^as the only thing.' Marxist point of view on the editorial board. But the true stumbling point was dis- A Moral Tepiiperc The Loemers of Dnfrht acdmnald, agreement about the right position to take edited bv Michael Wreszin; IVan R. Dcee, 480 on 7World WAar iI. Macdonald was against pages, $3s. sidinig -with the Allies in the war. His Marx-

The New Criterion November 200i 27 Dwight Macdo)nald by joseph Epstein

ist outlook, combinied with a newly bur- politics, USA or USSR, and if we find it im- geoning pacificism, persuaded him that the possible, fromii the standpoint of our own war was little more than one among capi- values and hopes, to choose cither, wlhere are talist imperial powers, cxcluding the Soviet we?" In need, I'd say, of a mental gyroscope. Union, which, as an anti-Stalitnist, he Yet thcre xvas soinething gallant, even viewed as a totalitarian, nation. He thought heroic about the one-inan (and wife) stand the war a mistake because it didn't confront entailedi in putting out Politics. Macdonald the issue of social class and wasn't reallv a did it on the savings from his relatively xvar about democracy. He xvas an advocate lucrative salary at Foeine and his wife's of what was then known as a "Third Camp' small trust fund, which brought in $4000 a position, between and Stalinisni, year. He stayed on the case of his contribu- which would be truly rcvolutionary social- tors, whom he could't have been paying ism. Only an intellectual, as Orwell said in very much, to produce quality prose. He another connection, could be so stupid. tells the young thalt an article he wrote for thenmagazine on Walter Reu- All an intellectual has, it sometimes seems, ther is "lousy.? Hc eliminated straight liter- is his integrity. This he guards as a Boston ary criticisn from the magazine and gave virgin guards her chastity. What integrity great prominence to popular culture, wlhich me ans for most intellectuals is proper align- he viewed as helping to barbarize the ment of their opinions. Perfect consistency country. He took potshots at SULch "lib-labs" bestoxvs that condition devoutly to be and "Stalinoids ' as he called them, as Heniry sought, ideological purity, "Ideas arnd prin- Steele Commager, Carey McWilliams, and ciples were what was important to Dwight, I. F. Stone. He published the odd, some- not the politics-nor the historical context,' times important piece that might not have wrote Michael Wrcszin in his biography. He found a place elsewhere: Simonte W"Teil on is correct in saying that Macdonald did not The riia; on the coIn- tailor his writing "to fit an eftc&tive political centration camps in Germany. Paul Good1- agenda?' What mattered more for him was mnan, l)aniel Bell, C. Wright Mills were establishing a right alignment of opiniion among the American conitributors to the such that he couild never be accused of magazine; Andrea Caffi, Victor Serge, and contradiction, inconsistency, imppurity- Macdonald's dear friend Nicola Chiaro- God forfend, selling out. monlte were the leading European contrib- No little magazinc was perhaps more pure utors. than Politics, which Macdonald and his wife But at the heart of cvertlhing was Mac- founded soon after their departuLre from doniald, a three-armed Italian policemen, PartisanReview. I had not come into culttLral directing the heavy traffic in competing consciousness in time to read Politics, but I ideologies, isms, aund political schisms. do recall buving in i962 a remainderedR copv "Negativism remained Dwight's single of Meemoir of a Revolutionist-latcr, irn papcr- wcapon;' his biographer wrote, "a purity in back, retitled Politics Past-wvhich contained Politics and in politics, too, that had its much of Macdonald's political writing from comforts but offered little in the way of the magazine. Even his stylishness catnot genuine political activism?' survive what now seems the aridity ofi most Brutal in argument tlhough lhe could be, of the subject matter: political journalism foolish about other's peoplc's reactions to disappears faster than passion in a brothel hitm though he was ("What I don't know oni the equator. One can only wonider in about human relations?' he confessed during bemused astonishment at the perversitv of the tumult of leaving hlis first for his second political thinking that, in May 1947, can lead wvife), confident though he was that he was an intelligent person to write: "If we admit in possessiorn of the truth, there was, in his there are only two alternatives in world private life, more give, nmore of a sense of

28 TIhc New Criterion lNovlember zooi J)wight Macdonald byjoseph Epstein fairness and largeness of spirit to Dwight and the milieu I've lived in so long here in Macdonald than his hard-edged writing NYC'. To a reader of Politics he noted: "I nio conveved. HIe could command objectivity; longer sce any political (or . . . historical) he didn't always take thin-gs personallyX reality in sucth all-or-notliing doctrinics as Although his bien pensant friends pro- revolutionary or pacificism" fesscd not to understLnd his likinig for William F. Buckley, Jr., and although hc at- Freed from sectarian politics, Macdonald tacked the NTational Review for its styleless- turncd to cultural criticism. This entailed ness, Macdonald alxays defended Bucklev as an examination of contemporary cultural a nice nman, or, as he told F. W. Dupee, "a products for wliat thev night yicld in the hard guy to hate.' When late in life someone wvay of insight into the presuppositions and told himn that Borges x as a right-wvinger, he inner wvorkings of the larger society in replied, "Who gives a flick? When you're which thev w^ere produced. Cultural criti- that good it doesn't matter any more." cism gave him what fame he would enijoy as Politics ran between 1943 and 1949. Burn- a and made him a larger figure than ofUt for its editor set in roughly midxvay. The he had hitherto seemed, or perhaps even magazine went from a imonthly to a bi- dreanied. In the 196os, he wxas briefly em- monthly to a quarterly, and sonmctimes issues ployed to do ten-minute bits on movies fir came out wildlv late or missed appearilng NBC'S "Today Show?' Outside academic life, altogether. 1 the financial strain--"Every- among critics in the 1950s, a960s, and early thing I get involved in seems to be a way of 1970S perhaps only Edmund Wilson was not mnakinig money, or of losin1g it"-was better known. In large meast re, this was added political duibiety: "I have lost nw faith owing to the magazines for whiich he had in any general and radical improecment in begun- to write- The Nm Yorker and, latcr, modem society whether by Marxian social- Esqutire, for xvhom he xwrote about movies, ism or pacifist persuasion and ethical ex- In culture, Macdonald was a traditional- ample," he wrote to a subscriber in 1949. In ist, wh1ich meant an elitist, while remaining an item in its issue of July 1944, Macdoniald politically a main of the left. An "anarcho- wrote, "I have always had a sneaking ad- conservative" was one of the labels he used miration for the editors of a tinv nmimeo- to describe his own position in this middle graphed journal called Proletarian Outlook period. When tension betveen the two ap- xvho once asked the usuai leftist question, peared, the conserative in him tended to 'What is to be done?' and answered it unex- xvin out ovcr the anarchist. He ncver went pectedlv: 'Nothing, absolutely nothing? for the Beats in America nor the Anigry and the editors showed thev wvere in earnest Young Men in England. He despised the by folding tip their paper?" In I949, to the xvatering doxvn of culture -which supplied dismav of his small band of loval readers the poxverffll animus to his attacks oni the -amonig them1 T S. Eliot-Macdlonald did Great Books, the revised Bible, and the new the same with Politics. Webster's-and in devising his oxvn theory Sectarian Macdonald might from current of culture made use of the conservative perspectives seem, but he was not so far otlt Albert Jay Nock's Memoirs of a Supefluous of the main currents of the intellectual life Man. of his time. He was always anti-Staliniist. In The quickcst way to Dwight Macdonald's I949 he wvrote to William Phillips that "I'm heart-with, that is, a dagger-was to call fairly sure Hiss is guiltv"C IHe had hils doubts him "our best journalist" about the whole radical perspective on life did so, xvhcn reviexvilg Memoirs of a Revo- genierally: "Don't VOLu feel" lhe wrotc to lutionist in Dissent. Macdonald took this to Joan Colebrook, with whom he was having nmean that he was fundanmentally unserious. an affair, "that we've all been on the wrong "For xvhat is a journalist?,' he shot back in a track all our lives-by 'we' I mnean myself letter to the editor. "Alas, an ignorant and

Tlhe Neew Criterion Noveinber 2001 29 Dwvight Macdonald byvJosrph Epstein

superficial fellow, a kibitzer (rather than 'a where' which seems to mne also correct, man determined to a goal of action and though this was predictable with the rise of trutt')?'" Macdoniald felt him,self a thinker, higher (half-) education. subtle, 'discriminiating, penetrating. Yet one wishes Macdonald hacd taken on As a writer, 1he was a sprinter, not a tougher cases in this essay. He attaecks Our Archibald marathon man, and while hlis dreamn was the Town, The OldMan and tlhe Sea, book, his formn was thc essayv Over the years .MacLezishs play J.B. and Stcphen Vincent in his letters he refers to plans to write Bene'es poem John Brownls Body as cxamples books on modern dictatorship, miscorncep- of Midcult, when it would have been mruch tion-s about capitalism, Commuslnism and more interesting to cotnsider instead, say, fascism, the steel industry, Edgar Allan IPoe, Thie Deati of a Salesman, ThJe Naked and the an intellectual autobiography, mass culture, Dead, Cat o0t a Hot 7is Roof. and the poetrv and the Kennedy assassination. Enchanted of Mark Van l)oren. The essay also posits a cigarettes, Balzac called such books, works pretapsarian time for culture, with patroni- that exist ever so beautiftil:y only ir a writ- aristocrats cultivating beauitltifl gardens of er's mind as the smoke of fantasy formls art while the happy peasantry enjoved the before hint. Macdoalzad got furthest per- purest of folk art. TIhe existenrce of this alm- hips on a book on mass culture, biut what pie art-sensitive aristocracy is surelv a fic- he produced, a sixty-five-page essay tided tion; and thle loNwer classes of golden olden "Masscult & Midcultt shows that he days, one does well to rememner, had such probably didn't have a full book on thie charming divertissements as bearbaiting, subject inihim. dogfights, and gin drinkinilg to keep their Along with "T'he Responsibility OF m-inds off the plow. Peoples"-his essay about collective guilt As for the old leftist qulestion, "'Vhatis to after World War Two-"Masscult & Mid- be done?' Macdonald's best answer is thiat cult" is Macdonald's most ambitions intel- we recognize that we really have two cul- lectual effort.. A rerun of the old highbrow, tures, high (or authentic) and the rest (in- middilebrow, lowbrow triad developed by authentic), "that have developed in this Russell Lynes, the essay is a characteristic country, and that it is the national interest performance. Written with not a little dash, to keep themln separate?' He closes by not- it struggles to cut deep without quite being ing: "ILt the majority eavesdrop if they like, able to do so, despite an early Adorno but their tastes should be firmly ignored?' quotation and rmuch waving about of the flag of classical modernism: tvo Picassos Two cultures we now nave- have had, rampant upon a field of Finnegans Wake. shall always have -Lbut I wonder if wve need of "Masscult & Midccult" has two chief con- be miiuch concerned about the elitism cerns. The first is to mnake. the case that mass high ctulture, chiefl-y becaulse it is a dremo- entertainmenit is '"an instrument of dormina- cratic elite. In the United States, most of the tion?' The second is that Midcult, or the people who bothl create and respond to middlebrow, will infect true High Culturc, do not derive fromn the upper- and its values "instead of being transitional or eveni the uppcr-middle classes. They have -'the price of progress'-may nowv th-iem- comne instead in greater numbers from the selves become a debased, permanent stan- lowver-middle and middle classes. Nor have dard' Some good things get said alon0g tthe micost of them- gone to the putatively bcst way. Of the Lords of Kitsci, as he calls schools. Many of the people I know who themn, Macdonald says "never uniderestimrate are in on the secrct of the suiperiority of the ignorance and xvulgaritv of publishers. high culture have come to it by accident, al- movie producers, network executives, and mrost magically, through the luck of en- other architects of Masscult?" He declares "a countering an important teacher, book, re- tepid ooze of Midcult is spreading evenr- cording, or exhibition. Luck of all good

30 T'he New Criterion Nov)emuber 2oo7 Dwight Macdonald by Jfseph Fpstein

luck, a spark ignited the flame of a passion By the time of A rnies of the Ntqht, Mac- that didin't burn out. donald was all but finished as a writer. As Things ean be done through education to early as ig61 to Joln Lukacs, who was al- insure that some sparks continue to go off ways encouraginig him to be better than he and that flamies, once ignited, may be sus- was, fhe wrote: tained, But railing against mass culture is so much howling in the wind. Smashin-g the John, I am simply not in a state of mind to pretenses of middlebrow cuXlture that wants discuss seriously what I should be writinig. to pass itself off as rmore serious thani it is is This impasse, this long drawn-out depression, somnething else againi, and always worth do- must enid sometime. I am aware that it exists inig, andi this in his time Dwight Macdonald and that wvhat I am now writing is niot wvhat I did as well as anyone in the business, should be doing. But the cuestion is whiether he did any- thing more. A search of his wvritinigs reveals He was doing factual pieces for The Nvew nothing originial about his critical opinions. Yorker, but they seemed not to give him- He discovered no new or film- or his readers-much pleasure. "Fact is, I'm makers, nor revived the reputationis of anv sick to death of doing New Yoiker fact vnose reputationis were in need of revivai. pieces.... Exposition bores me. Let them He slashed 's bestsell- Look It Up themselves, I say.' ing novel, ignoring his earlier, more im- Macdonald's biographer describes but pressive work, vet fell for the elevated does not attempt to explain his writing clich6s of . As a critic of cul- block. Depres.ion is mentioned; so is heavy ture5 Macdonald fired away out of the se- drinking and the ineluctable fact of getting cure cockpit of received intellectual opinion. older. The general explanation for writing He shot a spitball at Cozzens, for example, block that I prefer is absence of fresh ideas, for being on record as admiring Somerset which I suspect applies in Dwight Mac- Maugham. Would he be shocked, I wonder, donald's case. In one of his letters, he makes to be told that Somerset Maugham is a bet- the point that the best method for commer- ter writer thhan Virgin ia Woolf? cial writing-the edge of the hack-is not to Witlh the exception of a rather disap- care about your subject. But Macdoniald poiniting piece on Buster Keaton written was never that kind of writer. 'Without pas- near the end of his life, he wrote no ex- sion, for him, all interest was drained. tended appreciations of a writer nor any Politics temporarily saved-or, depend- other artist. No one ever accused Mac- ing on one's point of view, pernmarently donaid the critic of fairness, evenhanded- sunk-him. Always anti-Stalinist, sometime ness, disinterestedness. His was chiefly a in the I950s, with Stalin now dead, he po'emical mind, quick, sharp, smart, but crossed the line to become anti-anti-Com- without much in the way of texture, bal- muni,st. At one point, he was scheduled to ance, concern- with cormplexity. replace Irving Kristol as co-editor with Stephen Spender of Encounter, the excellent IniArnmies of fthe NighTht (i968), his account of English monthlv. Doubts about Macdon- the anti-Vietnam-n War protest march on the ald's reliability set in and instead he was of: Penitagon, Normani Mailer describes him- fered the job at excellent pay as roving cor- self, Robert Loowell, an-d Dwight Macdon- respondent for the magazine. He wrote a ald as "America's best poet, best novelist, piece called "America! America!,' a standard and best critic." This is a judgment of all attack on UTnited States materialism (those three mcn that hasn't held up, but it is one tail fins on the cars, all those television sets, made in the first place more oin political and-would you believe it?-none of the than literary grounds-as, in i968, almost feeling of community one finds in Tuscany), all cultural judgments tended to be. that was rejected by Encounter, wvith much

The New Criterion November 2oor 31 Dwight Macdonald bvfoseph Epstein

anger on Macdonald's part. When it WLas chance to see one.' Here was Macdonald later revealed that EncouTnter had had finan- saying "Yes" again, more yeses this time out cial support from the CIA, he wrote that he than Mrs. Leopold Bloom. He wrote a let- was an "unwitting" accomplice of the CIA'S ter solicititng futnds for the StLdents for a "dirty work" and had been "played for a Democratic Society, and declared the Co- sucker?" (If MTacdonald were writing this lumbia ruckus "a beneficial disturbance" He piece, an asterisk would no-w appear, direct- was puffing on the good stuff-smoking, inig readers to a footnote that would read: that is to say, pot-and dabblinig wvith other "Any attempt on his part to return the drugs. At the New Haven trial of the Black rnoney is unknown?') Panther Bobbv Seale, he showed up wear- In 1967, he switched his column in Es- ing two buttons: a pink one for gay rights quire from movies to politics. The Free and another with Eldridge Cleaver's politi- Speech Movemcent at the urniversities lhad let cal apertu, "If you're not part of the solu- loose the young middle-class masses, the tion you'rc part of the problem?' Abbie Vietnam WN7ar had the country in a state of Hoffman became part of his social set. full-time agitationl, first I,vndon Johnson Going, you might say, going, and gone: and thcn that great punch-up Bo7. doll Richard Nixon were in the W\hite House- how sympathetic in general I am to the bliss it was in that daw,n to be alive, but to Young, they're the best generation I've known be an aging left-winger looking for new life in this country, the cleverest and the most vas verv heaven. serious and decent (thoough 11 wish they'd Dwight Macdonald was, after all these tt,AD a little = also I hate that obscenity bit, years, saying "Yes" again. "iThis is becoming Up Against the WA'all Motlerfiacker tuinrs ME our Peloponnesian Waar," he wrote about off, nor do I like-though must accept wryly Vietnam. He was on the side of the draft- -that "shir" has becomne an ordinary word of card burn-ers, withheld a fourth of his own parliamentary discourse, notlinlg obscene or income taxes in protest against the war, vulgar intended, they just use it the way bracketed Lyvndotn Johnson with Hitler ansd we wvould say "nonsense?) [Well, not quite Stalin, wrote "I am ashamed to be an Ameri- gonle.] can?" ARL cultural standards were out the window, as he praised his friend Manry In a very poor piece hc wrote for The New McCarthy's pro-North Vietnam book rYok Revi of Bookes attacking Torrm Wolfe, he (though he himself opposed siding with the showed himself jealous of a younger writer Viet Cong, for reasons both moral and who had swept the boards of all the kind of prudential) and Barbara Glarson's playMac- attention his own writing used to garner. Bird, which laid the blamie for Kennedy's as- His attack on Wolfe reads rather like an at- sassination on his vice-president. He at- tack on himself. He mentions the books tended a White House Festival of the Arts, Wolfe had promised b1ut failed to write. He boorishly asking other guests to sign a peti- claims that Wolfe's subjects are of only tion expressing dismay over the country's ephemeral interest and his writing won't policies in Vietanam and the Dominican last. He nails him for producing ani anthol- Republic. At the protest marchi at the Plen- ogy on the Nex' Journalism: "Those who tagon, he was disappointed not to have been can, write; those who can't, anthologize." arrested. A case, not uncotnmmon on the The ironv of thiis remark is that the only bourgeois left during the 196os, of pure sub- book of Macdonald's that is likely to have poena envy. a continuing life is Parodies, a brilliant an- "You must come uip right away, Dwight" thology of the forn he published in 1960. . W Dupee rcported enthusiastically over the phone from Coliumlbia Universitv. "Ies According to his biographer, Macdonald a revolution. Yfou may never get another died thiniking himself a failure. Perhaps at

32 The New Criterion November zoox Dwvight Macdonald byfoseph Epstein

the end each of us docs, but Macdoinald had ing intellectual clichc and utopiani abstrac- the fiurther goads in this direction supplied tion, for vhlicli no vivid actual examples by drink and depression. (He was in ps)- exist, A creative disorder man, he felt the chotherapy for the last decade of his life.) countnr was inl better shape when distur- Karl Kraus defined a journalist as "no ideas banice, and not order and harmony, wvas and the ability to express them." Not true of dominant. The status quo, fUr him, was al- Macdonald, wvho could be said to have been wavs the enemyn. When his friend Delmore sunburned b1y ideas. It's the quality of his Schwartz died, he recognized that there was ideas that is troublesome. How tired and a large self-destructive element in Schwartz thin, received and even rather coarse they -xvho had an overnveening ambition com- now seem, begoinning with the notion that bilned xvith true meental illness-but that being radical, which Macdonald liked to didnl't stop Macdonald from making the reminid his readers means "goes to the root,' hoary claim that America is not kind to its suggested greater penetration than calmcr, poets and that Schwvartz was, somehowx a more centered thinking. While he rightly victim of mass society understood that his mind worked best when rubbing Up againist the particular and This samne nmass societv had for a timne the concrete instance, he allowed lots of grcatlv elevated Macdonald, and such was ideas-TErotskyism, anarchismn, pacificisnm, his fame that in the late i950s scrious people cven nudism-to violatc him by destroying begaI comparing himn to Mark Twain and his conmmoin sensc and balanced perspective. H. L. Mencken. Writilng to Ian Watt about Aesthetically,, Macdonald's central idea this, Macdonald not immodestlv claimed, seems to be that form and content were in- "I've always been more tough-minded, less divisible, Stvle and iman, he liked to quote open to illusions than Mark was-and mv Buffon saying, they are one and the same. laughter is not so bitter as his was, int his last One understands the attraction of stuch a phase? (There is also the fact that Mark notion, the swv7eet symmetry of it, btut ad- Twainvwas a thwarted artist, and Macdonald herence to it would force one to disqualify a pure critic.) I-Ic disliked Menckeni's style, every bad writer in the history of thought, but allowed that "like Mencken, I reallv beginning with Immanuel Kant and nin- enjoy being disappointed and outraged." ning through at least John Dcwev. But one of the principal differences be- Another of Macdonald's core ideas was tween Mencken and Macdonald, alonig with that the job of the intellectual was to keep the fomier having had greater energy, more up the critical pressure, especially on his impressive intellectual production, and own countr,x, which, by definition, can nev- deeper influence upon his time, is that er be g(xod cnough. The word intellectual Meneken had a surer understanding of the was purely an honorific for Macdonald and reality of everyday life in America. More cru- with dissent understood to be the first cial, his scepticism was much greater. priority of inteclectuals. This of course neg- NoNvhere was this scepticism greater than lects the possibility of the reflective intellec- about ideas, for which Mencken had the tual, on1 the model of Tocqueville. Mac- greatest distrust. He was always blowing the donald wianted terriblv for intellectuals to whistle on con men-professors, would-be matter in history, but seems to have failed revolutionaries, and anyone else who to notice that whenever they have-during claimed hc had the answers to the impossible the French anid Russian and (to lower the questions. IhvXight Macdonaild far more scale a bit) Cuban revolutions-it has al- often blew the trumpet, welcoming their ar- ways meant disaster. rival. in a smnalltime way,, he was himself, un- Macdonald's other ideas were equallv thin. consciously,7 even one of the con men. Poor He was big on community,, that longstand- guy, he just couldn't stop saving "Yes."

The New Criterioni November 200I 33 COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

TITLE: Dwight Macdonald: sunburned by ideas SOURCE: The New Criterion 20 no3 N 2001 WN: 0130501518004

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