BOOKS
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phases of Macdonald's life - a life whose swirling variations could be
compared to a Jackson Pollock canvas - Whitfield adds very little to
what has been written already about Macdonald's extraordinary in–
tellectual career. A graduate of Exeter and Yale, Macdonald began
his career in intellectual journalism with
Fortune.
His work there came
to end in 1936 in what was to become characteristic fashion, when
his series of articles savaging the United States Steel Corporation in
a magazine for businessmen ended with a climactic quotation from
Lenin's
Imperialism.
A convert to Trotskyism, he went on to become
a major contributor to
Partisan Review
into the war years, until he
broke with both, as well as with the allied war effort, in the name of an
ill-defined mixture of anarchism and pacifism. It was as the founder
and editor of
Politics
in the early postwar years that Macdonald came
into his glory. The magazine provided a voice for a number of as yet
little-known writers, such as Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, and
Nicola Chiaromonte, who were searching for a humanist and anti–
statist alternative to Marxism. When
Politics
collapsed in the late
forties, Macdonald gave up on both
Politics
and politics. Writing pri–
marily for
The New Yorker
in the 1950s, Macdonald turned to film
and cultural criticism, where his rhetorical talents and blend of an–
archist and aristocratic instincts produced a running critique of mass
culture.
In telling this story, Whitfield gives the reader the standard pic–
ture of Macdonald the engaging controversialist, the "systematically
unsystematic thinker," who was "never able to write a book in cold
blood." We learn that as a Trotskyist, this heretic among heretics
chose James Joyce as his party name. When Trotsky complained that
"everyone has the right to be stupid, but Comrade Macdonald abuses
the privilege," an unflustered Macdonald replied that Trotsky "seems
to be more interested in defending Leninism than in learning from
his mistakes." It was one of Macdonald's great strengths that he was
willing to learn from his, willing to break, for instance, with pacifism,
in the face of Soviet power. It is unfortunate then that Whitfield, the
author of the book on Hannah Arendt, literally ignores Macdonald's
role in the controversy over
Eichmann inJerusalem.
He never even tries
to explain why this man , who so often had been willing to change his
mind when confronted by the evidence, resolutely stuck to his guns
even as the factual basis of Arendt's argument was demolished. Was
it personal? Did it relate to the concordance of their ideas about the
evils of mass society? Or did it reflect what Mary McCarthy saw as a
Jewish-Gentile split over the book?
