THE GRAIN WON:

The Man Who Knew Too Much: a review of Interviews with Dwight Macdonald, Michael Wreszin, ed., (R.J. Stove, December 15, 2003, The American Conservative)

For a dead man, Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982) now looks pretty healthy. All too often during his old age, he found himself dismissed as a self-destructive dilettante. Nowadays, by contrast, he occupies a secure place as America’s best-known “unknown” man of letters (notwithstanding recent ad hominem diatribes, optimistically packaged as literary critiques, in the Washington Times and the Dartmouth Review). We owe this Macdonald revival wholly to Michael Wreszin, Professor Emeritus at Queens College in New York, who has turned himself with Stakhanovite dedication—how the Soviet-hating Macdonald would have shuddered at that adjective—into a one-man Macdonald industry. Wreszin’s aptly titled 1994 book A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald displayed astonishing diligence, and great shrewdness, in chronicling the life of Macdonald’s mind. (Macdonald seems to have had precious little life outside his mind.) Seven years afterwards appeared a Wreszin-edited collection of Macdonald’s letters, A Moral Temper. Neither volume received adequate press coverage, a fact that inspired the fear that public indifference had made Wreszin give up. Happily, here comes the third panel in Wreszin’s Macdonald triptych.

Historian John Lukacs called Macdonald “the American Orwell,” and certainly Macdonald resembled Orwell in several respects. Both men wrote invariably readable prose. Both men grasped, with cold fury, the causal linkage of linguistic corruption and ethical corruption. (Lukacs’s description of Macdonald’s writing process suits Orwell equally: “Every word was not only an aesthetic but a moral choice.”) Both men remain gratifyingly unclassifiable. Orwell the grimy materialist coexisted uneasily with Orwell the crypto-High-Tory romantic who on his deathbed craved Anglican hymns. Macdonald the self-proclaimed leftist loathed proletarian and industrial culture with a passion recalling Action Français leader Charles Maurras’s invective. For proof of his idiom’s Maurrasian elements, see his principal essay collection, Against the American Grain. Like T.S. Eliot—a lifelong hero of his—and like all other civilized people, Macdonald considered “elitist” to be not a swearword but a badge of honor. [...]

He arrived at his cultural conservatism (a phrase he may have coined; he undoubtedly took the credit for being the first to write of “mass culture”) via a circuitous route. A rich, apolitical, WASP Yale alumnus whom the Depression radicalized, he initially sought salvation in Moscow, only to lose his Stalinist faith once the show trials occurred. He reacted, as did other “Partisanskies”—his colleagues at the newborn Partisan Review—by embracing Trotskyism. Yet from 1941 he found the Trot temperament to be almost indistinguishable from the Stalinist one and fled that totalitarianism also.

The mid-1940s to the mid-1960s saw Macdonald at the height of his powers. He edited (1944-1949) his own heterodox little magazine, Politics, an object lesson in how to save the world when almost no one reads you. Politics made no money, its payments to contributors were laughable—he charmed Mary McCarthy into writing for free—and it never had more than 5,000 subscribers; but it published Orwell, Camus, C. Wright Mills, and Simone Weil, as well as The Group’s future author. After Politics, he gave us his most devastating literary articles, originally printed in Partisan Review, Commentary, and the New Yorker but afterwards assembled in Against the American Grain and Discriminations. In 1958, Commentary ran Macdonald’s hatchet job on the once fashionable novelist James Gould Cozzens: “By Cozzens Possessed,” probably the most murderous book review 20th-century America ever produced. From this period, in addition, dates much of Macdonald’s best political analysis, such as Memoirs of a Revolutionist contains; and patchier, though always scintillating, film criticism for Esquire, later republished as Dwight Macdonald on Movies. Once anti-Vietnam campus ferment began, Macdonald returned to leftist activism, his main practical contribution characteristically consisting of public fights with nearly every other leftist activist. This campaigning ended almost as suddenly as it started; during his last decade he drank too much, wrote too little, and became a peripatetic humanities lecturer, in which role he reached a special rapport with trainee policemen at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

As Christopher Hitchens has learned, and the career of Dwight MacDonald demonstrated, there's a danger to combining credulousness and contrarianism because it means that when folks look back over your career they'll discover that you for too long attacked those who were in the right.

MORE:
-BOOK SITE: Interviews with Dwight Macdonald, Edited by Michael Wreszin (University Press of Mississippi)
-ESSAY: "The Book-of-the-Millennium Club" (Dwight Macdonald, November 29, 1952, The New Yorker)
-ESSAY: A Critique of The Warren Report (Dwight Macdonald, March 1965, Esquire)

-ARCHIVES: Dwight Macdonald writes about writing
-ARCHIVES: Dwight MacDonald (NY Review of Books)
-ARCHIVES: "Dwight MacDonald" (Find Articles)

-REVIEW: of Against the American Grain by Dwight MacDonald (David Montgomery)
-REVIEW: of Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture; Discriminations: Essays & Afterthoughts; On Movies; and Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm...and After by Dwight Macdonald (John Gabree, New York Newsday)

-REVIEW: of INTERVIEWS WITH DWIGHT MACDONALD, Edited by Michael Wrezin (JEFFREY HART, Washington Times)

Macdonald liked the stance of an aristocratic bohemian and man of taste. What one remembers of him perhaps is his once famous distinction between Masscult, Midcult, and High Culture. There's no mystery about Hugh Culture: Yeats, Matisse. Masscult comes out of a juke box. But Midcult is the enemy: a spurious imitation of High Culture, like, say, Thornton Wilder's "Our Town."

Possibly these distinctions are worth starting with.

In his one-man magazine Politics Macdonald did a surgical destruction of the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign, the destruction lots of fun at the time. In Commentary he performed a hit job on a wildly overrated novel by James Gould Cozzens, "By Love Possessed." The novel was not good, but in "Guard of Honor" Cozzens had written what might be a great novel, and Macdonald would have done well to register his awareness of this, if, indeed, he was aware of it.

Macdonald survived as a writer on his fluency, but he had no consistent aesthetic, political, or moral standards. He imagined Norman Mailer to be a great writer. Coleridge admired the kind of mind that could entertain contradictory ideas and be energized by them. Macdonald could certainly entertain contradictory ideas but he seems to have been entirely unaware that they were contradictory, so they could hardly be energizing. To say the least, he did not have anything approaching a first-rate mind. Irresponsible would be to put it mildly.

-REVIEW: Dwight Macdonald: sunburned by ideas: a review of A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald, edited by Michael Wreszin (Joseph Epstein, New Criterion)

Macdonald had been drifting leftward. “Marx goes to the heart of the problem,” he wrote to a college classmate in 1936. To the same man he wrote: “I’m growing more and more intolerant of those who stand—or rather squat—in the way of radical progress, the more I learn about the conservative businesses that run this country and the more I see of the injustices done people under this horrible capitalist system.” Earlier he had noted that “my greatest vice is my easily aroused indignation—also, I suppose, one of my greatest strengths. I can work up a moral indignation quicker than a fat tennis player can work up a sweat.” Over the years his similes would improve, if not his temperament.

By the time he was thirty, Macdonald was fully formed, intellectually and emotionally. Politically, he was anti-Stalinist and anti-statist yet also anti-capitalist. In the 1936 presidential election, he voted for Earl Browder, the Communist candidate. For a few years he was a member of the Trotskyite Worker Party. But he had only to join a group to find it objectionable and thus left the Workers Party in 1941. Trotsky himself had referred to him as a “Macdonaldist.” (In an article left in his dictaphone machine before his death, he described a Macdonald piece as “very muddled and stupid.”) Macdonald always took the high road—that “moral indignation” again—preferring clarity over complexity in politics and keeping a palette restricted to two colors, black and white, with very little interest in gray shadings or texture of any sort. His unwillingness to grant America the least virtue led him to make some impressively idiotic statements, notable among them: “Europe has its Hitlers, but we have our Rotarians.”

-REVIEW: of A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald, edited by Michael Wreszin(Robert Fulford, National Post)

One reason he argued so much was that he kept changing political sides -- and no matter what side he was on, he always knew it was the right one. A friend of the Communist Party in the early 1930s, he soon joined a Trotskyist (therefore anti-Moscow) party, then defected to another Trotskyist party, then withdrew from all parties to become a pacifist, a position he held with dogged passion during the Second World War. In the Cold War he at first considered both sides abhorrent but reluctantly backed the U.S. -- though he never came to like his fellow Americans ("an unhappy people ... without style, without a sense of what is humanly satisfying"). In the 1960s, enraged by the Vietnam War, he joined the student rebels, calling them "the best generation I have known in this country, the cleverest and the most serious and decent," though he wished they would occasionally read a book.

Through it all he desperately protected his intellectual purity. In 1942 Mary McCarthy satirized him in a story, Portrait of the Intellectual as Yale Man: "His mind and character appeared to him as a kind of sacred trust ... It was as if he were the standard gold dollar against which the currency is measured."

-REVIEW: of A MORAL TEMPER: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald, Edited by Michael Wreszin (Dwight Garner , NY Times Book Review)

-REVIEW: of A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald by Michael Wreszin (John Elson, TIME)
-REVIEW: of A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald by Michael Wreszin (Gampo Mellichampe, Social Anarchism)
-REVIEW: of A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald by Michael Wreszin (Henry Gonshak, Montana Tech-UM)
-REVIEW: of A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald by Michael Wreszin (Harold Orlans, Change)
-REVIEW: of DWIGHT MACDONALD AND THE POLITICS CIRCLE: THE CHALLENGE OF COSMOPOLITAN DEMOCRACY by Gregory D. Sumner (Michael Wreszin, New Politics)
-ESSAY: A Nine-Hour Resurrection: Alexander Herzen, Marx's rival and Tolstoy's nonfiction counterpart, enjoys a well-deserved return to center stage in Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia (Christopher Hitchens, December 2002, Atlantic Monthly)

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 31, 2003 7:38 PM