138
PARTISAN REVIEW
in power. Macdonald could have spared
Ui
some of his esthetic youth
at Exeter and Yale and have used the space to comment on some of
the
professional patriots and religionists who have been thrown up by
the
left. Sainte-Beuve once remarked that in France people remain Catholics
long after they have ceased to be Christians. Certain people in America
today have remained "revolutionists" long after they have ceased
to
believe in anything whatever. In one of Macdonald's best chapters,
his
"letter" to Henry Luce on the Time-sponsored "cultural" magazine
that
William Schlamm was to edit, there is a pointed indication of what
Schlamm-and later, the
National Review-represents.
But how much
more could we have used on those other old "revolutionists"
who,
whether they take to Americanism, or to Judaism, or to Richard Nixoo,
or to the Catholic Church, are all "revolutionists" still, eternal ideologists,
unrelenting fanatics. Macdonald is wrong in thinking that the left
bas
lost all its potency and power. It is from the ranks of old revolutionists
that have come labor advisers to Eisenhower, brain trusters to unilll
racketeers, dopesters for McCarthy, "salesmen" of American democracy
abroad, expert consultants to Hollywood on the Red Menace, professional
informers to smut magazines.
The truth is that in this country, where there are hardly any
genu–
ine conservatives in power, old revolutionists constitute not a party
but
an information service. They are the ones who "know"--or who knew
first; it was they who once saw the totalitarian beast face to face.
After
such knowledge, what forgiveness? Of themselves, their past? Of
the
"liberal," "innocent" world that still does not know? One path for
the
old revolutionist is that of power; another, Macdonald's, is that of
per–
sonal confession, of vigilant truth-telling, no matter how absurd
sounds. Macdonald is not a Machiavellian old revolutionist, but he
the equally unprofitable illusion that "candor" is the same as
truth.
Although no one has been more critically and attentively concerned
with the reconstruction of human values on the left, he is the kind
Ii
man who would rather sound foolish than take thought, who identu!eI
honesty with self-deprecation, impatience with wit. It is a measure
Ii
our horror of certain impersonal slogans and anti-human dogmas
that
this sense of the individual person should be so anguished. But one
would have liked from Macdonald less autobiography in this sense
and
more reflections on the history, the character, the possible future
the old revolutionist as a force in our culture. It is this lack of thought.
fulness, of objective concern, that gives his book so inunediately transient
a quality. The book would have been far more durable
if
it had
heeD
more openly and humbly the study of a generation, for it
is
a fact
