April 16, 2006
Essay
Dwight Macdonald at 100
By JAMES WOLCOTT
It doesn't take brute force to stop a rampaging writer in mid-
monologue. Sometimes an innocent question does the trick. Late in his
life Dwight Macdonald was holding court at a party when a young woman
inquired from the peanut gallery, "Mr. Macdonald, what do you do?"
According to Michael Wreszin's biography of Macdonald, "A Rebel in
Defense of Tradition," the normally voluble billy goat was thrown for
a loss. "Well, I, I, I was a writer, an editor of Partisan Review and
Politics, wro . . . wrote for The New Yorker." The incident was more
than ego-deflating — it was demoralizing. It signified that to the
younger generation Macdonald was an unidentified relic of unknown
occupation. Talking about himself in the past tense brought him face
to face with the erosion of his reputation and name recognition after
a swashbuckling career as critic, editor, protester, provocateur and
all-around word warrior.
An intellectual journalist equally at leisure in the jaunty pages of
Esquire (where he reviewed films) and the ascetic quarters of
Partisan Review, Macdonald — born 100 years ago last month — was a
generalist whose specialty was capsizing conventional wisdom,
exposing highfalutin fraudulence and filing heretical dissents. His
essays on mainstream American culture ("Masscult and Midcult") and
the barbarisms of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible were
literary events; his lambasting of James Gould Cozzens's novel "By
Love Possessed" was comparable to Mark Twain's defenestration of
James Fenimore Cooper; his tenure as founding editor of Politics, a
small radical publication started in 1944 after he broke with
Partisan Review over the war (he opposed America's entry), yielded
major work by Simone Weil, Albert Camus and Bruno Bettelheim; his
impious critiques of biblical epics — later collected in "On Movies"
— were cheerfully absurdist (from his review of "The Greatest Story
Ever Told": "There was also that 'Woman of No Name' who pushes
through the crowd as Jesus is healing the sick and, after he has
grappled with her, cries out in purest Bronx, 'Oi'm cured! Oi'm
cured!' and turns around to run toward the camera with arms waving in
triumph — and damned if it isn't Shelley Winters"); his championing
review of Michael Harrington's "Other America" in 1963 helped ignite
the antipoverty movement.
But you can't dine on clippings and the bones of old controversies,
so what did his versatile output amount to after decades of pounding
the typewriter? For years before his death in 1982 from congestive
heart failure, Macdonald had been battened down by booze, pressing
doubts and writer's block; frustrated, fatigued and plagued by the
feeling that he had failed to climb the masthead of his talent by
writing a major, original work — bringing out a real book, not just a
basket of articles. His friend James Agee had burned himself out in a
frenzy of nicotine and all-nighters. But despite Agee's centrifugal
disarray, he went up in smoke with a gnarled masterpiece pinned to
his name ("Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"), a posthumous Pulitzer
Prize (for "A Death in the Family") and a live-hard-die-young legend
that would draw future disciples into the tomb, rummaging through the
remains for saintly artifacts. More of an odd-jobber and instigator,
Macdonald harbored no creative cravings, courted no muse, left behind
no masterpiece to keep his legacy warm at night. Today, he and many
of his concerns could hardly seem more dead. Masscult, midcult — who
cares anymore? It's all one big postmodern mishmash. Yet sometimes
the most important thing a critic leaves behind is a singular, wised-
up, cant-free voice that is pure intelligence at play, and at its
best Macdonald's voice shoots off the page as if he were broadcasting
live and cutting through the static.
Macdonald majored in being a misfit, the odd man out who somehow
managed to fit in just long enough to irritate and activate everyone
within the same orbit. At Exeter he belonged to a club called the
Hedonists, whose members, all three of them, strutted around the
campus with canes. After attending Yale, he enrolled in Macy's
executive training program and, on coming to his senses, joined Time
and later the fledgling Fortune magazine, where he became radicalized
when he realized what dumb clucks and cowardly lions the captains of
industry actually were.
Politically, he was all over the left side of the dance floor,
nicknamed "flighty Dwighty" for his ideological flappings and earning
a memorable rebuke from Leon Trotsky: "Every man has a right to be
stupid on occasion but Comrade Macdonald abuses it." He marginalized
himself during World War II by making pronouncements that were not
just foolish but feckless, the leakage of a cracked egghead (like
this beaut: "Europe has its Hitlers, but we have our Rotarians"). An
Ivy League WASP in the largely Jewish C.C.N.Y. circles of the
Partisan Review set, he found himself on the bitter outs with many of
his intellectual confreres when he defended Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann
in Jerusalem" against its detractors.
Although the New York intellectuals associated with Partisan Review
were a contentious lot, Macdonald's saving grace — what set him apart
from the other touchy high-strungs — was his ample accommodation for
conflicting viewpoints even when they rammed his hull, as long as
they had wit and merit. He believed in being open to reversals of
opinion, including his own. He dissected The New Yorker in the debut
issue of Partisan Review, yet later hopped aboard as a staff writer,
a professional relationship that blossomed into blushing romance.
"Although Macdonald would not admit it," Norman Mailer wrote in "The
Armies of the Night," "he was in secret carrying on a passionate love
affair with The New Yorker — Disraeli on his knees before Victoria."
But those aging knees locked in place, and for a decade Macdonald did
little for the magazine except occupy an office, his writer's block
making every sentence a painful extraction. His monologues migrated
elsewhere — into classroom lectures, speeches at antiwar and pro-
student demonstrations, and, fortunately for us, a large chunk of the
bustling correspondence that makes up "A Moral Temper: The Letters of
Dwight Macdonald." This is the book where the staccato rhythm of
Macdonald thinking fresh at the typewriter rings most clearly through
the ether, and reveals the man in full.
I was fortunate enough to catch Macdonald in action when he was still
capable of blowing off a little good-natured steam at the expense of
intellectual druids whose tastes seemed inscribed on tablets. In
1980, Skidmore College was the site of a conference on the sunny
topic "American Civilization: Failure in the New World?" Among those
invited to discuss a paper by George Steiner and other subjects were
Cynthia Ozick, Leslie Fiedler, Susan Sontag and Macdonald, who
endeared himself to me by saying at the outset of the panel on film
and theater that Steiner's and Ozick's pretentious solemnity "turned
me off culture — and I don't know when I'm going to get back to it."
His foil on the panel was The New Republic's eternal film critic,
Stanley Kauffmann, the gentlemanly soul of generosity, who at one
point said he didn't want to speak slightingly of "the popcorn
crowd," which made Macdonald crack, "Aw, go ahead." Kauffmann: "No,
no; Ingmar Bergman has remarked that those who go to see a Doris Day
film — forgive me, is she still alive? — may go to see one of his
films the following week. Often in the same theater." Macdonald:
"They shouldn't be allowed to." Back and forth they bantered, like a
couple of cranky pigeons on a park bench, until Kauffmann explained
to the audience that Macdonald came from the Mencken generation, more
comfortable responding to culture with a cynical No rather than an
embracing Yes. Macdonald pleaded guilty, but argued that experience
had taught him the wisdom of heeding his inner veto power: "When I
say no I'm always right, and when I say yes I'm almost always wrong."
Right or wrong, his verdicts would mean nothing to us now if he
hadn't invested them with a humming force of personality and humor
that opened up daylight wherever his mind gusted. Every intellectual
era needs its dedicated pirates, and Dwight Macdonald was one of
postwar's finest. He wrote and spoke as if fear and conformity were
foreign to his nature and affronts to the spirit of liberty. If he
were alive, he'd scoff at what wimps we've become under the threat of
terrorism. He'd scold us for letting ourselves down. Happy birthday,
Dwight, and give our best to Jim Agee.
James Wolcott is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
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