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PARTISAN REVIEW
Yet with all this, there is some question in my mind as to just
what purpose a collection of Macdonald's back pieces can serve right
now. Much of the excitement of
Politics
consisted in its European con–
now. Much of the excitement of
Politics
consisted in its European
contributors.
Memoirs of a Revolutionist
is not a systematic study
the kind of memoir that Edmund Wilson likes to do, where the center
of interest is not so much in the period as in its confrontation by a
wholly literary imagination. Macdonald is neither an historian nor a
theoretician; he is essentially a cultural critic, a born "magazinist," as
he describes himself, who cannot write a book in cold blood, but who
is stimulated by a speech, a slogan, a book, to do quick slashing analyses
of the issues it raises. Unfortunately, many of these issues no longer
seem very real ten years later-at least not in the wholly polemical
terms in which Macdonald likes to attack them. Macdonald's chief
concern during the war period is epitomized by his section on "The
Responsibility Of Peoples" (the original title of this book); he fought
constantly against war-time hysteria and the idea of "total" German
guilt. In 1943-45, it took some courage and independence-if not ne–
cessarily a knowledge of Germany- to take this position. But Mac–
donald's irritability on this question has, for obvious reasons, no great
relevance at a time when the (West) Germans are the richest and
smuggest people in Europe today, and when it takes real courage to
insist that the Germans were responsible at all for the unspeakable mass
murders of civilian populations.
If
we take the book as cultural criticism-as an example of the
kind of literature made famous in this country by Mencken-the book
may seem to justify itself in the way that old volumes of Mencken's
Prejudices
do. General Patton's pearl-handled revolvers are about as
interesting just now as the antics of William Jennings Bryan, but Mac–
donald on Patton is lively and vitriolic in the style of Mencken on
Bryan. Although Macdonald's often solitary fight against the "war
idols" made one think of Randolph Bourne, Macdonald's best work
is always negative and slashingly critical, like Mencken's. Like Mencken,
Macdonald has instinctive sense of the phoniness and absurdity on the
American scene, and he can always spot cultural pretension. It is a
pity, in this connection, that he did not include in this book his memor–
able
New Yorker
attack on Mortimer Adler and the ''Great Books"
syntopicon. Macdonald there illustrated a kind of cultural criticism
that is rarely done in this country, for we have so few people who com·
bine any kind of cultivation with real freedom of manner. But despite
this alertness to the inflated and the absurd, Macdonald is not very
