John Simon
DWIGHT MACDONALD: 1906-1982
That Dwight Macdonald should die in the third week of
December strikes me as a plot to overthrow Christmas. For anyone
whose secular faith is in the trinity of truth, beauty, and decency, in
culture as in life, Dwight was an authentic, tangible Santa Claus.
Such mundane reasons as his white hair and goatee and his chortling
merriment may have contributed something to this impression, but
much more relevant was that, in writing as in conversation, he
always came bearing gifts for the discerning and deserving: the gift
of intelligence, the gift of wit, the gift of taste. He was, like Bernard
Shaw in England or Andre Gide in France, a man whose opinion on
any issue we waited for-whether that issue was political, social,
cultural, artistic, or moral. His may not always have been the voice
of ultimate , incontrovertible reason-whose voice is?-but it was
consistently that of genuine, idiosyncratic, penetrant insight, salted
with humor and peppered with pugnacity. Whether or not it
provided ultimate answers-and often enough it did-it unfailingly
set us thinking along the right track.
If
what I am about to say is rather personal, that should be
appropriate for a man whose criticism distinguished itself by the
intense personalness-or personality-it so artfully and artlessly
conveyed.
It
is his uncompromising yet utterly accessible, jargon–
free, lavishly bequeathed individuality that made Dwight the universal
critic he was. And critic he was of everything he touched or was
touched by, because for him criticism meant explaining to
himself-and, therefore, to others-the meaning and value, or
uselessness and harm, of whatever his curious and capacious mind
engaged in a wrestling bout. He would search, sift, weigh, and savor
in the most spontaneous and unpretentious, yet also intransigent,
manner, in order to distinguish between what was real and what was
sham, between what enhanced life and what merely encumbered or
wasted it, between what was food for the soul and what was only its
bubble gum or potato chips.
Mr. Simon delivered these remarks at Dwight Macdonald's funeral service on
December 23, 1982.
