132
PARTISAN REVIEW
never forgot : the city is a place of virtuosity, where men can perform with
freedom and abandonment' ') but, ranging over several literatures, he also
relates our mistakes and myths about the city to a kind of cultural remorse ,
and indicates the need for political action . I think he overrates Solzhenitsyn ,
whom he uses as a stick to beat Lukacs; he can be brisk in polemic, as against
George Steiner and Kate Millett , but at his best, say in the essay on Pound 's
last literary prize , he has a very humane sense of conflicting clatms and values ;
this also controls his essays on Sylvia Plath and suicide, and in the end gives the
collection its quite undeniable distinction.
Many of the articles in Dwight Macdonald's book are already and justly
famous , and it hardly falls to me to explain, in this journal , how valuable and
enviable an asset he is to his society. He declares that the business of the critic
is to discriminate, that is, in Webster 's definition (2nd. edition, naturally) to
distinguish accurately, for example between fancy and fact . This account of
his purposes hardly allows for the frequent gratuitous ebullition of high spirits
that characterizes his record offact and his assault on fancy , but it does explain
his willingness to find things out. As an enquirer he is perpetually rewarded
with glimpses of truth and folly .
This book opens with the long
Esquire
essay proposing amendments to
the Constitution, engagingly festooned with footnotes, an aftetword and an
appendix. The rest of it has original things to say about practically every event
of national importance in the writer's lifetime, or at any rate from the Thirties
on , with Hiss and Columbia , the Pentagon March , the Johnson Arts Festival,
the Chicago Conspiracy trial strongly featured , and the Warren Report
obligingly " rescued from its authors ." Among the individuals who get the
rough side of Macdonald 's tongue are Marshall McLuhan, Tom Wolfe and
Norman Cousins at whichever desk ,
Saturday Review
or
World :
" I've always
specialized in negative criticism ."
Discriminations
is a necessary book because it fills in the lacunae in
earlier collections made by a powerful and prolific commentator.
It
is also
great fun; as with Gibbon,
you
can have a good time merely by reading the
footnotes. Nor should these remarks suggest any lack of tonal variety, for
Macdonald is versatile as well as instantly identifiable. His onslaughts against
America are , I think , a sign of health. One piece here reprinted is the famous
" America! America! ," originally written for
Encounter
and rejected by the
journal's backers because, using as a standard an admittedly somewhat
romanticized view of England in 1956-7, he attacked his own country as
lacking in conviviality and manners, and as an unresisting prey to repellent
cults . This article is the only piece of writing known to have been rejected by
Encounter
at the insistence of the Congress for Cultural Freedom ; it was so
identified when the whole pathetic truth came to light in 1967 . Macdonald
now adds an Aftetword which will come in handy when somebody sets about
