Dwight Macdonald: sunburned by ideas

Dwight Macdonald:
sunburned by ideas
by Joseph Epstein
At
a rg80 symposium at Skidmore College
set in mrotion by a normally portentous
essay by George Steiner about the death of
culture in America, Dwight Macdonald,
long established as a slashing critic of popLar cuilture and politics, sitting on a panel
on "Film and Theatre in Anerica,' seemed
to have little of interest to say. He was
seventy-four years old and a fairly serious
boozer who had written almost nothing of
interest for more than a decade. He seemed
the intellcctual equiivalenit of the boxer who
has taken way too many shots to the head.
His death by congestive heart failure was
tvo years away. Reacting against the tendency in the discussion to take a-Lrrent-day
mo-ies and plays seriously, Macdonald
emitted- one almost hears him muttering
-a remark that could stand as the epigraph
for hlis long career in intellectual journalism:
"LVOThe1e I say 'no' I'm always right and -when
I say 'yes' I'm almost alwvavs wrong"
Dwight Macdonald was the intellectual
par excellence, whichi is to say without any
specialized knowledge he was prepared to
comment on everthing, boisterously and
always with what seemed an unwavering
confidence. He was the pure type of the
amateur, and gloried in the status. And why
not? "What's wrong with leing an amateur," one easily imagines him saying. "Look
wvhere the professionals have got us."
Perhiaps this is too mucl in the spirit of
put-down. But then this was also Macdonald's reigning spirit, and possibly it is con-
tagious. Answering a reader wvho accused
him of taking a sniide tone in an article
011 the Ford Foundation in The Nrew Yorker
in I954, he put the blame for the article's
tone on himself, writing: "after all, I've
done a lot of 'snide' writing in my time,
[anid] am indeed rather an
SOB,
on paper
at lcast?'
I once greatly admired D-wight Macdonald, and I esteemed precisely that uinforgiving, relentless SOB side of him above all. As
a graduate of Mencken University. with a
major in what I took to be anti-BS and a
minor in radical politics, I thought Macdonald, when I first came across his writing
in the late 195oS, ncxt in succession to 1H. L.
Mencken himsclf. To read Macdonald on
t-he barbarity of General George S. P'atton,
the goofy gadgetrv of Mortimer J. Adler's
Syntopicon to the Great Books, the depredations upon the King James Bible committed by its new English translators w^as to
hear melodious bells go off and have the sky
fill with firewvorks.
Macdonald got away with muclh that ,he
did through style. The trick of this style was
to be sharp and intimate simultaneously. He
wrote to a correspondent that the secret to
successfiUl lecturing was to speak as if talking
to no more than three or four people, and
he seemed to write the same way. His general tone was that of the unconnable addressing the already highly skeptical. He
never condescended to his readers, assuming that they were on his intellectual level.
The Newv Criterion NToPember 2001
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Dwighlt Macdoniald by Joscpb Fpstein
Lucc's inew mnagazilne, devoted to chroniicling the high romance of in;dustry an:id
commerce. He spoke well of Luce personally- thoulgh often m1ockin1g h£im, once
referring to him as "Il I aLce"8-but Timec
Inc. was a persistent force for evil in the
culture drama that played in Macdonald's
hcad. "For fourteen years." he wrote of his
frienld James Agee, "like ana elephant learning to deplcoy a parasol, Agec devoted his
prodigioLus gifts to Lucean journialism:'
Born in 1906, the soTn of a father who was
Feeling lirmself stifled by working for
a lawyer and a n other with s(ocial pretenFortune, Macdonald, with twvo Yale classsions, Dwight iMacdonald was by backmates, Frecd Dlupee and George L. K. Morground upper-middle class. He was a prep
ris, began, as a moonlghting venture, a
school boy (Exeter) and an Ivy League iman
magazirie calledMvisrelany, a bimonthly that
(Yale), whose first job out of school was in
lasted niearly tvo years. Througzh Dupee he
the executive training program at Macy's.
wvas put in touch with Philip RLahv and WilYet straight out of the gate he was a rebel,
liam Phillips, who had recently removed the
antagonizer division. At Exeter, at fourteen,
nagazine Partisan Revien', out from unider
he and a frienid formed a group called The
Stalinist sway of the John Reed Club,
the
Hedonists, vhose motto was "epater tes
and -were lookinig for financial supporters to
baurgeois." Altlhough as a young man he
keep it alive. Along with Dupee anid Morris,
held many of the prejudices of his social
dass-racism, anti-Semitism-a strong be- Macdonald became one of the magazine's
five principal editors.
lief in religion was not among themi. "LiterMacdoonald had been driftirg leftward.
ature and knowledge, wisdom and wnder"Marx goes to the heart of t'he problem;" he
standing, intellect, call it what y0ou will, is
wrote to a college classmate ini I936. To the
my religion:" These woyuld be the gods he
samne man he wrote: "I'm growing more
worshipped ail his life.
and more intolerant of those who stand-or
"I have a prose mind,' the young Dwight
rath-er squat-in the way of radical progress,
Macdonald wrote in college. "1 want to
the mrore I learn about the conservative
Write serious criticism:' At irst, though, he
businesses that run this country and the
was swept away by the vigor of businessmen,
more I see of the injustices done people
whoim he found "wvere keenier, more effiunder this horrible cap-italist svstem.' Earlier
cient, more sure of their power than any college prof I ever knexw' Upon discovering hle hie had noted that "my greatest vice is nmy
easily aroused indignation-also, I suppose,
had n10 mind for bush ess, he took up a n0oone of m-.y greatest strengtlhs. I cani work up
tion he found in readiing Spengler: that there
ndigiiationi quicker thian a fat tena mora i
and
w'ere MAen of Truths and Men of Action,
xvork up a swTeat? Over the
can
player
nis
then
he was clearny among the formner. Even
would improve, if not his
similes
his
vears
ideolar,
vet
he liked to have an idea-not
temperamenit.
made.
he
ogy-in support of at y move
By the time he was thirty, Macdonald was
Macdonald's next step was to a job at
formied, in-tellectually and emotionally.
filily
a
Yale
through
got
he
Time nagazine, which
he was anti-Stalinist and antiPolitically,
two
the
of
onLuce,
Henry
classmate.
anti-capitalist, In the 1936
also
vet
statist
and
a
Yalie,
hirnself
was
Ti7te,
fo'unders of
he voted for Earl
electoion,
al
president
a
farn
as
functioned
Yale
years
many
for
candiidate. For a
Communist
tihe
Browder,
Macdonald
Inc.
Time,
for
sorts
of
team
few years he was a member of the 'Trotskyite
began by writing finan-ie and businiess
stories, and soon was transferred to Foaurtue, WNorker Party. But he had only to join a
A brilliant counterpuncher, specializing in
mockery of his opponents, he wrote unshapely essays in whiclh the best thingias were
often to be found in ungainly asterisk footnotes. His witticisms seemned truth-bearin-g.
'IThe first sentence of his article on the Ford
Founidation ran: "The Ford Foundation is
a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want somce
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 New York Intellectuals. I knew that
before his death, he describcd a -Macdonald Macdonald's wvife Nancy had served as buspiece as "very muddled and stupid?') lM7aciness manager-the unkniowin soldicr of
donald always took the high road-that
most little magazines-of Partisan Revieiv,
"morat indignation" again-preferrinig clarbut 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 shadwhose Tenth Street Village apartment it wvas
iings or texture of any sort. His un-willingactually 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 Partisan Review
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
biographer Michael Wreszin.1 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 atI alxvavs defend vou among academnics and the
tacking Malcohn Cowley for his Stalinism
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 repredictions 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, disrcfavor 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' apnot 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 disA 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 MarxThe New Criterion November 200i
27
Dwight Macdo)nald by joseph Epstein
ist outlook, combinied with a newly burgeoning pacificism, persuaded him that the
war was little more than one among capitalist imperial powers, cxcluding the Soviet
Union, which, as an anti-Stalitnist, he
viewed as a totalitarian, nation. He thought
the war a mistake because it didn't confront
the issue of social class and wasn't reallv a
xvar about democracy. He xvas an advocate
of what was then known as a "Third Camp'
position, between fascism and Stalinisni,
which would be truly rcvolutionary socialism. Only an intellectual, as Orwell said in
another connection, could be so stupid.
All an intellectual
has, it sometimes seems,
is his integrity. This he guards as a Boston
virgin guards her chastity. What integrity
me ans for most intellectuals is proper alignment of their opinions. Perfect consistency
bestoxvs that condition devoutly to be
sought, ideological purity, "Ideas arnd principles were what was important to Dwight,
not the politics-nor the historical context,'
wrote Michael Wrcszin in his biography. He
is correct in saying that Macdonald did not
tailor his writing "to fit an eftc&tive political
agenda?' What mattered more for him was
establishing a right alignment of opiniion
such that he couild never be accused of
contradiction, inconsistency, imppurityGod forfend, selling out.
No little magazinc was perhaps more pure
than Politics, which Macdonald and his wife
founded soon after their departuLre from
PartisanReview. I had not come into culttLral
consciousness in time to read Politics, but I
do recall buving in i962 a remainderedR copv
of Meemoir of a Revolutionist-latcr, irn papcrback, retitled Politics Past-wvhich contained
much of Macdonald's political writing from
the magazine. Even his stylishness catnot
survive what now seems the aridity ofi most
of the subject matter: political journalism
disappears faster than passion in a brothel
oni the equator. One can only wonider in
bemused astonishment at the perversitv of
political thinking that, in May 1947, can lead
an intelligent person to write: "If we admit
there are only two alternatives in world
28
TIhc New Criterion lNovlember zooi
and if we find it imfromii the standpoint of our own
values and hopes, to choose cither, wlhere are
we?" In need, I'd say, of a mental gyroscope.
Yet thcre xvas soinething gallant, even
heroic about the one-inan (and wife) stand
entailedi in putting out Politics. Macdonald
did it on the savings from his relatively
lucrative salary at Foeine and his wife's
small trust fund, which brought in $4000 a
year. He stayed on the case of his contributors, whom he could't have been paying
very much, to produce quality prose. He
tells the young Irving Howe thalt an article
he wrote for thenmagazine on Walter Reuther is "lousy.? Hc eliminated straight literary criticisn from the magazine and gave
great prominence to popular culture, wlhich
politics, USA or USSR,
possible,
he viewed
as helping
to barbarize the
country. He took potshots at SULch "lib-labs"
and "Stalinoids ' as he called them, as Heniry
Steele Commager, Carey McWilliams, and
I. F. Stone. He published the odd, sometimes important piece that might not have
found a place elsewhere: Simonte W"Teil on
The riia; Bruno Bettelheim on the coIn-
centration camps in Germany. Paul Good1mnan, l)aniel Bell, C. Wright Mills were
among the American conitributors to the
magazine; Andrea Caffi, Victor Serge, and
Macdonald's dear friend Nicola Chiaromonlte were the leading European contributors.
But at the heart of cvertlhing was Macdoniald, a three-armed Italian policemen,
directing the heavy traffic in competing
ideologies, isms, aund political schisms.
"Negativism remained Dwight's single
wcapon;' his biographer wrote, "a purity in
Politics and in politics, too, that had its
comforts but offered little in the way of
genuine political activism?'
Brutal in argument tlhough lhe could be,
foolish about other's peoplc's reactions to
hitm though he was ("What I don't know
about human relations?' he confessed during
the tumult of leaving hlis first for his second
wvife), confident though he was that he was
in possessiorn of the truth, there was, in his
private life, more give, nmore of a sense of
J)wight Macdonald byjoseph Epstein
fairness and largeness of spirit to Dwight
Macdonald than his hard-edged writing
conveved. HIe could command objectivity;
he didn't always take thin-gs personallyX
Although his bien pensant friends professcd not to understLnd his likinig for
William F. Buckley, Jr., and although hc attacked the NTational Review for its stylelessness, Macdonald alxays defended Bucklev as
a nice nman, or, as he told F. W. Dupee, "a
hard guy to hate.' When late in life someone
told himn that Borges x as a right-wvinger, he
replied, "Who gives a flick? When you're
that good it doesn't matter any more."
Politics ran between 1943 and 1949. BurnofUt for its editor set in roughly midxvay. The
magazine went from a imonthly to a bimonthly to a quarterly, and sonmctimes issues
came out wildlv late or missed appearilng
altogether. 1 the financial strain--"Everything I get involved in seems to be a way of
not mnakinig money, or of losin1g it"-was
added political duibiety: "I have lost nw faith
in any general and radical improecment in
modem society whether by Marxian socialism or pacifist persuasion and ethical example," he wrote to a subscriber in 1949. In
an item in its issue of July 1944, Macdoniald
wrote, "I have always had a sneaking admiration for the editors of a tinv nmimeographed journal called Proletarian Outlook
xvho once asked the usuai leftist question,
'What is to be done?' and answered it unexpectedlv: 'Nothing, absolutely nothing?
and the editors showed thev wvere in earnest
by folding tip their paper?" In I949, to the
dismav of his small band of loval readers
-amonig them1 T S. Eliot-Macdlonald did
the same with Politics.
Sectarian Macdonald might from current
perspectives seem, but he was not so far otlt
of the main currents of the intellectual life
of his time. He was always anti-Staliniist. In
I949 he wvrote to William Phillips that "I'm
fairly sure Hiss is guiltv"C IHe had hils doubts
about the whole radical perspective on life
genierally: "Don't VOLu feel" lhe wrotc to
Joan Colebrook, with whom he was having
an affair, "that we've all been on the wrong
track all our lives-by 'we' I mnean myself
and the milieu I've lived in so long here in
NYC'. To a reader of Politics he noted: "I nio
longer sce any political (or . . . historical)
reality in sucth all-or-notliing doctrinics as
revolutionary socialism or pacificism"
Freed from sectarian politics, Macdonald
turncd to cultural criticism. This entailed
an examination of contemporary cultural
products for wliat thev night yicld in the
wvay of insight into the presuppositions and
inner wvorkings of the larger society in
which thev w^ere produced. Cultural criti-
cism gave him what fame he would enijoy as
a writer and made him a larger figure than
he had hitherto seemed, or perhaps even
dreanied. In the 196os, he wxas briefly employed to do ten-minute bits on movies fir
NBC'S "Today Show?' Outside academic life,
among critics in the 1950s, a960s, and early
1970S perhaps only Edmund Wilson was
better known. In large meast re, this was
owing to the magazines for whiich he had
begun- to write- The Nm Yorker and, latcr,
Esqutire, for xvhom he xwrote about movies,
In culture, Macdonald was a traditionalist, wh1ich meant an elitist, while remaining
politically a main of the left. An "anarchoconservative" was one of the labels he used
to describe his own position in this middle
period. When tension betveen the two appeared, the conserative in him tended to
xvin out ovcr the anarchist. He ncver went
for the Beats in America nor the Anigry
Young Men in England. He despised the
xvatering doxvn of culture -which supplied
the poxverffll animus to his attacks oni the
Great Books, the revised Bible, and the new
Webster's-and in devising his oxvn theory
of culture made use of the conservative
Albert Jay Nock's Memoirs of a Supefluous
Man.
The
quickcst way to Dwight Macdonald's
heart-with, that is, a dagger-was to call
him "our best journalist" Paul Goodman
did so, xvhcn reviexvilg Memoirs of a Revolutionist in Dissent. Macdonald took this to
nmean that he was fundanmentally unserious.
"For xvhat is a journalist?,' he shot back in a
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
man determined to a goal of action and
trutt')?'" Macdoniald felt him,self a thinker,
subtle, 'discriminiating, penetrating.
As a writer, 1he was a sprinter, not a
marathon man, and while hlis dreamn was the
book, his formn was thc essayv Over the years
in his letters he refers to plans to write
books on modern dictatorship, miscornception-s about capitalism, Commuslnism and
fascism, the steel industry, Edgar Allan IPoe,
an intellectual autobiography, mass culture,
and the Kennedy assassination. Enchanted
cigarettes, Balzac called such books, works
that exist ever so beautiftil:y only ir a writer's mind as the smoke of fantasy formls
before hint. Macdoalzad got furthest perhips on a book on mass culture, biut what
he produced, a sixty-five-page essay tided
shows that he
"Masscult & Midcultt
probably didn't have a full book on thie
subject inihim.
Along with "T'he Responsibility OF
Peoples"-his essay about collective guilt
after World War Two-"Masscult & Midcult" is Macdonald's most ambitions intellectual effort.. A rerun of the old highbrow,
middilebrow, lowbrow triad developed by
Russell Lynes, the essay is a characteristic
performance. Written with not a little dash,
it struggles to cut deep without quite being
able to do so, despite an early Adorno
quotation and rmuch waving about of the
flag of classical modernism: tvo Picassos
rampant upon a field of Finnegans Wake.
"Masscult & Midccult" has two chief concerns. The first is to mnake. the case that mass
entertainmenit is '"an instrument of dormination?' The second is that Midcult, or the
middlebrow, will infect true High Culturc,
and its values "instead of being transitional
-'the price of progress'-may nowv th-iemselves become a debased, permanent standard' Some good things get said alon0g tthe
way. Of the Lords of Kitsci, as he calls
themn, Macdonald says "never uniderestimrate
the ignorance and xvulgaritv of publishers.
movie producers, network executives, and
other architects of Masscult?" He declares "a
tepid ooze of Midcult is spreading evenr30
T'he New Criterion Nov)emuber 2oo7
where' which seems to mne also correct,
though this was predictable with the rise of
higher (half-) education.
Yet one wishes Macdonald hacd taken on
tougher cases in this essay. He attaecks Our
Town, The OldMan and tlhe Sea, Archibald
.MacLezishs play J.B. and Stcphen Vincent
Bene'es poem John Brownls Body as cxamples
of Midcult, when it would have been mruch
more interesting to cotnsider instead, say,
Thie Deati of a Salesman, ThJe Naked and the
Dead, Cat o0t a Hot 7is Roof. and the poetrv
of Mark Van l)oren. The essay also posits a
pretapsarian time for culture, with patroniaristocrats cultivating beauitltifl gardens of
art while the happy peasantry enjoved the
purest of folk art. TIhe existenrce of this almpie art-sensitive aristocracy is surelv a fiction; and thle loNwer classes of golden olden
days, one does well to rememner, had such
charming divertissements as bearbaiting,
dogfights, and gin drinkinilg to keep their
m-inds off the plow.
As for the old leftist qulestion, "'Vhatis to
be done?' Macdonald's best answer is thiat
we recognize that we really have two cultures, high (or authentic) and the rest (inauthentic), "that have developed in this
country, and that it is the national interest
to keep themln separate?' He closes by noting: "ILt the majority eavesdrop if they like,
but their tastes should be firmly ignored?'
Two cultures we now nave- have had,
shall always have -Lbut I wonder if wve need
be miiuch concerned about the elitism of
high ctulture, chiefl-y becaulse it is a dremocratic elite. In the United States, most of the
people who bothl create and respond to
high cuLture do not derive fromn the upperor eveni the uppcr-middle classes. They have
comne instead in greater numbers from the
lowver-middle and middle classes. Nor have
micost of them- gone to the putatively bcst
schools. Many of the people I know who
are in on the secrct of the suiperiority of
high culture have come to it by accident, almrost magically, through the luck of encountering an important teacher, book, recording, or exhibition. Luck of all good
Dwight Macdonald by Jfseph Fpstein
luck, a spark ignited the flame of a passion
that didin't burn out.
Things ean be done through education to
insure that some sparks continue to go off
and that flamies, once ignited, may be sustained, But railing against mass culture is so
much howling in the wind. Smashin-g the
pretenses of middlebrow cuXlture that wants
to pass itself off as rmore serious thani it is is
somnething else againi, and always worth doinig, andi this in his time Dwight Macdonald
did as well as anyone in the business,
But the cuestion is whiether he did anything more. A search of his wvritinigs reveals
nothing originial about his critical opinions.
He discovered no new writers or filmmakers, nor revived the reputationis of anv
vnose reputationis were in need of revivai.
He slashed James Gould Cozzens's bestselling novel, ignoring his earlier, more impressive work, vet fell for the elevated
clich6s of Norman Mailer. As a critic of culture5 Macdonald fired away out of the secure cockpit of received intellectual opinion.
He shot a spitball at Cozzens, for example,
for being on record as admiring Somerset
Maugham. Would he be shocked, I wonder,
to be told that Somerset Maugham is a better writer thhan Virgin ia Woolf?
Witlh the exception of a rather disappoiniting piece on Buster Keaton written
near the end of his life, he wrote no extended appreciations of a writer nor any
other artist. No one ever accused Macdonaid the critic of fairness, evenhandedness, disinterestedness. His was chiefly a
po'emical mind, quick, sharp, smart, but
without much in the way of texture, balance, concern- with cormplexity.
IniArnmies of fthe NighTht (i968), his account of
the anti-Vietnam-n War protest march on the
Penitagon, Normani Mailer describes himself, Robert Loowell, an-d Dwight Macdonald as "America's best poet, best novelist,
and best critic." This is a judgment of all
three mcn that hasn't held up, but it is one
made in the first place more oin political
than literary grounds-as, in i968, almost
all cultural judgments tended to be.
By the time of A rnies of the Ntqht, Macdonald was all but finished as a writer. As
early as ig61 to Joln Lukacs, who was always encouraginig him to be better than he
was, fhe wrote:
John, I am simply not in a state of mind to
discuss seriously what I should be writinig.
This impasse, this long drawn-out depression,
must enid sometime. I am aware that it exists
and that wvhat I am now writing is niot wvhat I
should be doing.
He was doing factual pieces for The Nvew
Yorker, but they seemed not to give himor his readers-much pleasure. "Fact is, I'm
sick to death of doing New Yoiker fact
pieces.... Exposition bores me. Let them
Look It Up themselves, I say.'
Macdonald's biographer describes but
does not attempt to explain his writing
block. Depres.ion is mentioned; so is heavy
drinking and the ineluctable fact of getting
older. The general explanation for writing
block that I prefer is absence of fresh ideas,
which I suspect applies in Dwight Macdonald's case. In one of his letters, he makes
the point that the best method for commercial writing-the edge of the hack-is not to
care about your subject. But Macdoniald
was never that kind of writer. 'Without passion, for him, all interest was drained.
Politics temporarily saved-or, depending on one's point of view, pernmarently
sunk-him. Always anti-Stalinist, sometime
in the I950s, with Stalin now dead, he
crossed the line to become anti-anti-Communi,st. At one point, he was scheduled to
replace Irving Kristol as co-editor with
Stephen Spender of Encounter, the excellent
English monthlv. Doubts about Macdonald's reliability set in and instead he was of:
fered the job at excellent pay as roving correspondent for the magazine. He wrote a
piece called "America! America!,' a standard
attack on UTnited States materialism (those
tail fins on the cars, all those television sets,
and-would you believe it?-none of the
feeling of community one finds in Tuscany),
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
later revealed that EncouTnter had had financial support from the CIA, he wrote that he
was an "unwitting" accomplice of the CIA'S
"dirty work" and had been "played for a
sucker?" (If MTacdonald were writing this
piece, an asterisk would no-w appear, directinig readers to a footnote that would read:
"Any attempt on his part to return the
rnoney is unknown?')
In 1967, he switched his column in Esquire from movies to politics. The Free
Speech Movemcent at the urniversities lhad let
loose the young middle-class masses, the
Vietnam WN7ar had the country in a state of
full-time agitationl, first I,vndon Johnson
and thcn that great punch-up Bo7. doll
Richard Nixon were in the W\hite Housebliss it was in that daw,n to be alive, but to
be an aging left-winger looking for new life
vas verv heaven.
Dwight Macdonald was, after all these
years, saying "Yes" again. "iThis is becoming
our Peloponnesian Waar," he wrote about
Vietnam. He was on the side of the draftcard burn-ers, withheld a fourth of his own
income taxes in protest against the war,
bracketed Lyvndotn Johnson with Hitler ansd
Stalin, wrote "I am ashamed to be an American?" ARL cultural standards were out the
window, as he praised his friend Manry
McCarthy's pro-North Vietnam book
(though he himself opposed siding with the
Viet Cong, for reasons both moral and
prudential) and Barbara Glarson's playMacBird, which laid the blamie for Kennedy's assassination on his vice-president. He attended a White House Festival of the Arts,
boorishly asking other guests to sign a petition expressing dismay over the country's
policies in Vietanam and the Dominican
Republic. At the protest marchi at the Plentagon, he was disappointed not to have been
arrested. A case, not uncotnmmon on the
bourgeois left during the 196os, of pure subpoena envy.
"You must come uip right away, Dwight"
. W Dupee rcported enthusiastically over
the phone from Coliumlbia Universitv. "Ies
a revolution. Yfou may never get another
32
The New Criterion November zoox
chance to see one.' Here was Macdonald
saying "Yes" again, more yeses this time out
than Mrs. Leopold Bloom. He wrote a letter solicititng futnds for the StLdents for a
Democratic Society, and declared the Columbia ruckus "a beneficial disturbance" He
was puffing on the good stuff-smoking,
that is to say, pot-and dabblinig wvith other
drugs. At the New Haven trial of the Black
Panther Bobbv Seale, he showed up wearing two buttons: a pink one for gay rights
and another with Eldridge Cleaver's political apertu, "If you're not part of the solution you'rc part of the problem?' Abbie
Hoffman became part of his social set.
Going, you might say, going, and gone:
how sympathetic in general I am to the
Young, they're the best generation I've known
in this country, the cleverest and the most
serious and decent (thoough 11 wish they'd
tt,AD a little = also I hate that obscenity bit,
Up Against the WA'all Motlerfiacker tuinrs ME
off, nor do I like-though must accept wryly
-that "shir" has becomne an ordinary word of
parliamentary discourse, notlinlg obscene or
vulgar intended, they just use it the way
we wvould say "nonsense?) [Well, not quite
gonle.]
In a very poor piece hc wrote for The New
rYok Revi of Bookes attacking Torrm Wolfe, he
showed himself jealous of a younger writer
who had swept the boards of all the kind of
attention his own writing used to garner.
His attack on Wolfe reads rather like an attack on himself. He mentions the books
Wolfe had promised b1ut failed to write. He
claims that Wolfe's subjects are of only
ephemeral interest and his writing won't
last. He nails him for producing ani anthology on the Nex' Journalism: "Those who
can, write; those who can't, anthologize."
The ironv of thiis remark is that the only
book of Macdonald's that is likely to have
a continuing life is Parodies, a brilliant anthology of the forn he published in 1960.
According to his biographer, Macdonald
died thiniking himself a failure. Perhaps at
Dwvight Macdonald byfoseph Epstein
the end each of us docs, but Macdoinald had
the fiurther goads in this direction supplied
by drink and depression. (He was in ps)chotherapy for the last decade of his life.)
Karl Kraus defined a journalist as "no ideas
and the ability to express them." Not true of
Macdonald, wvho could be said to have been
sunburned b1y ideas. It's the quality of his
ideas that is troublesome. How tired and
thin, received and even rather coarse they
now seem, begoinning with the notion that
being radical, which Macdonald liked to
reminid his readers means "goes to the root,'
suggested greater penetration than calmcr,
more centered thinking. While he rightly
understood that his mind worked best
when rubbing Up againist the particular and
the concrete instance, he allowed lots of
ideas-TErotskyism, anarchismn, pacificisnm,
cven nudism-to violatc him by destroying
his conmmoin sensc and balanced perspective.
Aesthetically,, Macdonald's central idea
seems to be that form and content were indivisible, Stvle and iman, he liked to quote
Buffon saying, they are one and the same.
One understands the attraction of stuch a
notion, the swv7eet symmetry of it, btut adherence to it would force one to disqualify
every bad writer in the history of thought,
beginning with Immanuel Kant and ninning through at least John Dcwev.
Another of Macdonald's core ideas was
that the job of the intellectual was to keep
up the critical pressure, especially on his
own countr,x, which, by definition, can never be g(xod cnough. The word intellectual
was purely an honorific for Macdonald and
with dissent understood to be the first
priority of inteclectuals. This of course neglects the possibility of the reflective intellectual, on1 the model of Tocqueville. Macdonald wianted terriblv for intellectuals to
matter in history, but seems to have failed
to notice that whenever they have-during
the French anid Russian and (to lower the
scale a bit) Cuban revolutions-it has always meant disaster.
Macdonald's other ideas were equallv thin.
He was big on community,, that longstand-
ing intellectual clichc and utopiani abstraction, for vhlicli no vivid actual examples
exist, A creative disorder man, he felt the
countnr was inl better shape when disturbanice, and not order and harmony, wvas
dominant. The status quo, fUr him, was alwavs the enemyn. When his friend Delmore
Schwartz died, he recognized that there was
a large self-destructive element in Schwartz
-xvho had an overnveening ambition combilned xvith true meental illness-but that
didnl't stop Macdonald from making the
hoary claim that America is not kind to its
poets and that Schwvartz was, somehowx a
victim of mass society
This samne nmass societv had for a timne
grcatlv elevated Macdonald, and such was
his fame that in the late i950s scrious people
begaI comparing himn to Mark Twain and
H. L. Mencken. Writilng to Ian Watt about
this, Macdonald not immodestlv claimed,
"I've always been more tough-minded, less
open to illusions than Mark was-and mv
laughter is not so bitter as his was, int his last
phase? (There is also the fact that Mark
Twainv
was a thwarted artist, and Macdonald
a pure critic.) I-Ic disliked Menckeni's style,
but allowed that "like Mencken, I reallv
enjoy being disappointed and outraged."
But one of the principal differences between Mencken and Macdonald, alonig with
the fomier having had greater energy, more
impressive intellectual production, and
deeper influence upon his time, is that
Meneken had a surer understanding of the
reality of everyday life in America. More crucial, his scepticism was much greater.
NoNvhere was this scepticism greater than
about ideas, for which Mencken had the
greatest distrust. He was always blowing the
whistle on con men-professors, would-be
revolutionaries, and anyone else who
claimed hc had the answers to the impossible
questions. IhvXight Macdonaild far more
often blew the trumpet, welcoming their arrival. in a smnalltime way,, he was himself, unconsciously,7 even one of the con men. Poor
guy, he just couldn't stop saving "Yes."
The New Criterioni November 200I
33
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TITLE: Dwight Macdonald: sunburned by ideas
SOURCE: The New Criterion 20 no3 N 2001
WN: 0130501518004
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