COMMENT
DWIGHT MACDONALD
The latest product of the craze for biography that
produced Michael Wreszin's life of Dwight Macdonald has not enhanced
the memory of Macdonald.* Mostly it is because it features his shortcom–
ings rather than his assets. For one thing, his biographer makes Macdonald
out to be a permanent rebel, like a kind of personification of Trotsky's
permanent revolution. But this loses its meaning when
all
it seems to in–
dicate is that Macdonald supported a variety of causes but always seemed
to be in disagreement with his co-rebels. In fact, he was against any form
of authority, even left-wing authority, but he was mainly against what he
thought of as the established order, or the system. Of course it is not diffi–
cult to be this kind of permanent rebel. All you need is a private income
or a tenured position. And being a rebel all one's life is more of an indul–
gence than a political program. Indeed it might be more appropriate to
say that Macdonald was a permanent loner or dissident. He was out to
epater
the establishment, including the establishment composed of radical
causes or organizations. He had a yearning to be in a minority, even in a
minority of one.
In addition, Wreszin details every twist and turn of Macdonald's
thinking, on every conceivable issue. The trouble is that Macdonald was
not primarily a theorist, though he assumed the posture of one. In fact, he
was at his best when he was articulating the views of the serious intellec–
tual community surrounding him. Thus, his best work came in the early
days of
Partisan Review,
in the late thirties and early forties, when he was
trashing the Communists and the fellow travellers and the culture that
emerged from them.
Dwight's talent was as a journalist. Indeed, he was one of the finest of
his time - witty, thorough, ingenious, inventive. He was at his best when
he was a journalistic spokesman for the community of New York intellec–
tuals gathered around
Partisan Review
in the thirties and forties. His anti–
Communist pieces were superbly written. And his full-scale debunking of
Henry Wallace was a
tour de Jorce.
But later Macdonald became restless and
began
to
look for new causes. At the time, socialism, at least as
exemplified in the Soviet Union and in the Soviet satellites, was being
questioned by the more sophisticated political intellectuals. They were
not ready
to
jump on some new utopian bandwagon. Macdonald, how–
ever, with a few other disenchanted figures, such as Nicola Chiaramonte
and Paul Goodman, made the leap to a kind of amalgam of morality and
anarchism. No doubt, Macdonald's new magazine,
Politics,
which he
edited after leaving
Partisan Review,
was lively and interesting, even
*
A Rebel in Defense of Tradition . The Life and
Politics
of Dwight Macdonald.
By
Michael Wreszin. Basic Books. $30.00.
