482
PARTISAN REVIEW
Where had she gone? Beyond
the tucked and level bed, I floundered
in my wild reflection in the mirror.
As he asserts at the end of "The King of the Ditchbacks":
And I saw myself
rising to move in that dissimulation,
a rich young man
leaving everything he had
for a migrant solitude.
This is Heaney's poetic intention, with all its personal, artistic, and
political ramifications. Self-damned, self-absolved, he is, as he says,
well "vested for this calling."
DEBORAH TALL
DWIGHT MACDONALD
A CRITICAL AMERICAN: THE POLITICS OF DWIGHT MACDONALD.
By
Stephen Whitfield.
Archon Books. $19.50.
Writing about Dwight Macdonald is a daunting task.
How, one must wonder, given Macdonald's famed ability to deliver
a verbal bullet to the brain, would one's own work fare under his
withering criticisms? But Stephen Whitfield, an historian at Brandeis
University and already the author of a carefully wrought, critically
sympathetic analysis of Hannah Arendt's concept of totalitarianism,
seems well suited for the task. But the historical scrutiny to which he
subjected
Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism
is largely ab–
sent from
A Critical American: The Politics
of
Dwight Macdonald.
The structure of the book takes its cue from William Phillips's
comment that "to understand Macdonald one has to understand the
way he reflected or reacted to the ideas around him and to the people
who held them." But in walking the reader through the numerous
