American Arts and Letters / Dwight Stuff

...There were many who owed him debts, for he had been so outgoing, so helpful to aspiring writers and editors throughout his life...

...In the competitive intellectual world, Dwight had never nurtured his career, had never been cautious and circumspect...

...And in the magazine of his own, called Politics, that Macdonald launched at the mid-point of America's involvement in World War II, he quasi-treasonously depicted the U.S...

...They did so, brutally...

...John Lukacs sees him as a tragic victim of the "bureaucratization of intellectual life," which produced a new breed of intellectuals whose "unceasing concern with public success or academic careers" was pursued "at the expense of authenticity and originality and often personal probity itself...

...And New Yorker editor William Shawn did not exaggerate by much when he hailed the Macdonald review of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible as "a masterpiece...

...companies have invested in Hungary...

...investment in Russia last year amounted to $1 billion, a mere third of the amount U.S...

...For like many other alienated New York intellectuals, Macdonald was caught up at the moment in visions of revolution in America...

...To be sure, he "ridiculed their bombast and posturing," as Michael Wreszin says, but he also had a "sneaking admiration for them...

...Consistency, however, was not one of the hobgoblins of this man's mind...

...Private U.S...

...As Higgins gave his views with much puffing and "a neighing stammer, his genital went back and forth like the slide of a trombone...

...At one point, Phillips's wife called out from the next room, "Leave him alone, leave him alone, leave him alone...

...Progressive, as a means of signalling his disgusted conclusion that the Democratic candidate, John W. Davis, was no better than President Coolidge...

...According to the interior ministry, smuggling of Russia's natural resources, from timber to uranium, was up 50 percent in 1993, and "better organized than ever...

...Such money, undoubtedly, was westward-bound...

...0 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR® SUBSCRIBER SERVICE Tr ) re", -47 If you have an inquiry regarding your subscription, wish to renew, or order a gift subscription for a friend, call our toll-free subscriber service at 1-800-524-3469...

...Kenneth S. Lynn, the author of Hemingway, is currently at work on a book on the life and times of Chartie Chaplin...

...What was decisive for his assessment of the future of the steel industry was not the halfhearted job of fact-gathering he did in his field trip, but his prior absorption of the Englishman John Strachey's Marxist analysis, in The Coming Struggle for Power (1935), of the contradictions and inevitable decline of capitalism...

...from Greenwich Village to Wellfleet, the sound of his screech-owl voice and nervous giggle rose above the din of a thousand cocktail parties...

...n a stirring summation of Macdonald in the dozen years before his death in 1982, Wreszin speaks more favorably of him than I would wish to...

...While the average life expectancy for Russian men dropped to 59 last year, sales of TV sets rose by 34 percent, radios by 45 percent, and refrigerators by 60 percent...

...A decade earlier, he had denounced America's "permanent adolescents," but now he became one...

...At least a third of the rubles converted into dollars on the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange last year had been embezzled...

...My landlady's husband died recently, after a horrifying kitchen accident in which he accidentally set himself on fire...

...As Michael Wreszin makes clear in his intelligent and well-researched biography of Macdonald,' it particularly bothered him that he had never had the self-discipline to produce a major book...

...For while there were a good many anti-war activists in the crowd, they honored the fact that they were guests in the President's house...

...Higgins's "penis which lay before him on the water-smoothed wood expressed all the fluctuations of his interest...

...Unfortunately, the accumulation of wealth here is following not the Italian but the Zairean model...

...His exhaustive review of Mortimer J. Adler's 54-volume edition (plus a two-volume index called a Synopticon) of the Great Books of the Western World was hilariously funny and full of wise words about the experience of reading...

...doesn't or cannot change its mass culture (movies, radio, sports cult, comics, television, slick magazines)," he warned in 1950 in yet another of his breathtakingly wrongheaded prophecies, "it will lose the war against the USSR...

...At the Arts Festival in the Johnson White House, he arrived wearing tennis shoes, and plunged downhill from there into depths of boorish behavior that embarrassed virtually everyone present...

...It was a ghastly affair...

...If the U.S...

...But the day-long pace of his drinking was not the life pattern of a happy man...

...Hired as a writer on fellow Yaleman Henry Luce's Fortune, he projected an ambitious series of articles on the steel industry, into which he intended to insinuate his contempt for the industry's top managers as beefy predators whose policies were as uncreative as they were irresponsiblei On a preparatory field trip to the Pittsburgh area in the fall of 1935, he was shocked by the squalor of company towns...

...Throughout the long thirteen-hour day, he loudly attempted to secure signatures from among the 400 invitees to an anti-Johnson foreign-policy petition, but was successful only in seven instances...

...It began at the morgue, where her husband's longtime friends raised toasts while employees continued about their work, running from office to office and barging through the gathered mourners...

...One morning, Macdonald met with Philip Rahv and William Phillips in Phillips's apartment...

...Since Rahv and Phillipswanted Macdonald's editorial participation in their project, they first had to turn him around politically by destroying his fellow-traveler illusions about Stalin...

...To some it seemed that Dwight was, at a crucial moment in his life, being marginalized by a younger generation of intellectuals who were obsessed by "making it...

...It was here, amidst all the glossy ads, that he did his best work, as a cultural demolition expert in the Menckenian mode...

...Long before the critics of PC emerged, Macdonald opined that if he were to write about "what Sitting Bull did to General Custer, some Indian Protective League would spring into action...

...Helped along by twenty drinks a day (bourbon and martinis, mostly), the essayist was famous in the circles he traveled in for his exuberance...

...Much less penetrating were the commentaries on the movies that he published, mainly in Esquire, although it still is refreshing to think of his dismissal of Paul Newman as "simply not an actor and possibly not even alive...

...Army as an institution that was poisoning the body politic by training young men to be efficient at and to glory in mindless brutality...

...Like "living in a concentration camp," he responded bitterly...

...The real villain in the modern world in his view was the concept of democracy, which had elevated the bovine masses to a political role beyond their capacity...

...Rahv and Phillips had severed their ties with the Communist Party and suspended the publication of their magazine, the Partisan Review, which had been financed by the Party...

...In the poll of undergraduate opinion on the Yale campus regarding the presidential election of 1924, the young Macdonald could have backed the third-party ticket headed by Robert M. La Follette, the revered Wisconsin 1 A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald...

...Kvantrishvili, who was assassinated earlier in the month, had been one of Moscow's top mafia bosses...

...Friendship is sending Xmas cards, sex is the wet dream of those chromium-plated Hollywood glamor girls, death—is not...

...Parlor radicalism, however, did not keep him from opting upon graduation for a business career...

...Yet while his sympathy for the workers who lived in them knew no bounds, he restricted his soundings out of their political temper to the radical activists in their midst...

...So I will give him—and the historian John Lukacs, whom he quotes—the final word about Macdonald: Many people loved being with him, loved his generally good humor...

...Thus, Saul Bellow's portrait of him in Humboldt's Gift, as the "lightweight" intellectual Orlando Higgins, contains a wickedly amusing description of Higgins and a friend discussing the McCarthy hearings while sitting stark naked on a log...

...As a longtime defender of elitist, high-brow culture, Macdonald ought to have defended the universities against the onslaughts of the bearded and braless vandals...

...After all, he argued in a review of Dennis's book in a misnamed publication called Common Sense, most intelligent Americans would certainly agree that Fascism was "superior to liberal capitalism as a technique for running modern society...

...Others found him garrulous and irritating...

...For Macdonald that morning was unforgettable...

...What he really meant by that amazing statement was that his own feelings about Mussolini and Hitler were mixed...

...She—thanks to donations from a hard-currency lodger and her husband's former colleagues—was able to scrape together $500 for a funeral...

...171 A t a Partisan Review party for Simone de Beauvoir in 1947, the guest of honor asked Dwight Macdonald what life was like in New York...

...Yet Wreszin makes a case for him as a member of a vanishing breed of irrepressibly individualistic naysayers that our suffocatingly institutionalized world ought to ponder...

...Nevertheless, he went to work, in 1952, for the New Yorker...

...Some people he had known well and worked with in the sixties, such as Jason Epstein and Norman Podhoretz, and others in the publishing and editing world, became impatient with him and avoided him when possible, ignored him at parties, and were not averse to labeling him an old fool and a has-been...

...At Macy's, he quickly learned that he didn't have a practical mind and lacked an aptitude for command...

...Because the Socialist Workers Party was pacifistic, he joined it, out of the conviction that American intervention in a European war would inevitably bring a rightist dictatorship to power in Washington...

...58 The American Spectator June 1994...

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...H e had his bloody nerve inveighing against sex...

...He also deserves our gratitude for the cultural generalization that in the case of "certain social groups" the "pendulum of social justice has swung back too far...

...He never called in any debts...

...News of the first purge trials in Moscow were also coming in at this time, and Trotskyists in New York were actively recruiting intellectuals into their ranks...

...They spoke to Macdonald of their hopes of re-establishing the magazine as an independent radical journal in opposition to Stalinist politics on the one hand and to Popular Front shibboleths about literature and culture on the other...

...At one point, they asked Tanya to wrap things up, as there were at least three other funeral parties lined up outside, waiting to use the room...

...The burial followed a lavish ceremony attended by prominent Russian entertainers and politicians...

...Only in the case of America, however, did Macdonald describe the phenomenon as a debilitating disease...

...No other American writer, not even the later Mark Twain, passed more caustic judgments on the land of his birth than Macdonald habitually did...

...Macdonald' s judgment of middlebrow culture was that it was a contemptible alternative to mass culture...

...Another triumph was his devastating critique of Webster's Third New International Dictionary...

...While he would never shave off the Leninesque goatee that he affected in the mid-thirties, his habit of switching allegiances eventually prompted an ex-friend to dub him "the Peter Pan of the Left...

...M acdonald's FBI file affirms that "the indices of the New York office reflect that [he] enrolled under the Communist Party Emblem in New York City in the 1936 Election Registration...

...With the rise of the protest movement against the Vietnam war, Macdonald embraced not only New Left politics but also the lifestyle of the youthful counterculture...

...At that price, however, all she could afford was a cremation...

...Nazi culture, Stalinist culture, and American culture were all alike in their vulgar manipulation of the mass mind...

...Last year, an estimated $15 billion left the country...

...In the social set that the twicemarried Macdonald partied with during Wellfleet vacations, adulterous affairs, mainly within the group, were an accepted procedure, and nude swimming at Slough Pond was de rigueur—for Macdonald at any rate...

...Tom Girdler of Republic Steel and his fellow magnates were historically doomed, Macdonald was sure...

...To this chimerical prophecy he shortly added another...

...Let him breathe...

...Was it any wonder that clever demagogues had been able to strip these fools of their power in so many countries...

...Instead, he joined the uprising at Columbia...

...According to Macdonald, mass culture, too, was a totalitarian phenomenon wherever it manifested itself...

...Unfortunately, there was more than a little madness in the new stances that the post-Stalinoid Macdonald adopted...

...If Beauvoir knew his essays, his answer could not have surprised her...

...Later, following a pro-forma eulogy by a crematorium functionary, Tanya watched as her companion of fifty years was placed in a cheap wooden box and carried on a conveyor belt through two black doors, to the accompaniment of piped-in organ music...

...Americans have been made into permanent adolescents by advertising, mass culture...

...Bellow ended the The American Spectator June 1994 57 passage by saying, "You could never feel unfriendly toward a man of whom you kept such a memory...

...A headlong reading of Lawrence Dennis's The Coming 56 The American Spectator June 1994 American Fascism (1936) served to persuade him that a totalitarian America was indeed a possibility...

...Reports in the waning days of 1936 from the Loyalist side of the Spanish Civil War spoke of Communist intrigues against anarchist and Trotskyist revolutionaries...

...Which leaves discrepancies a la Zaire...

...On April 14, meanwhile, the body of Otari Kvantrishvili was lowered into the ground in an oak casket with a silver Russian Orthodox cross...

...Instead, he cast his straw ballot for the Communist in the race, William Z. Foster...

...Invoking landmarks of the Russian Revolution," biographer Wreszin writes, he "described the math building as 'the Smolny Institute of the revolution, the ultraleft SDS stronghold,' " and to an old prep-school teacher of his at Phillips Exeter he proposed that the revolutionary young were "the best generation I have known in this country, the cleverest and the most serious and decent...

...In the November-December 1941 issue of the Partisan Review, he published a foaming diatribe entitled "Kulturbolshewismus and Van Wyck Brooks," in which the 55-year-old author of "America's Coming-of-Age" (1915) and The Flowering of New England (1936) was excoriated as the "leadingmouthpiece for totalitarian values" for having spoken out against the adversarial-minded masters of literary modernism who had failed to rally to the support of their government and society in a time of maximum peril for democracy...

...At the same time, he regarded his own life as a tissue of failures, and he kept a careful record of his disappointments...

...Basic Books, 590 pages, $30...

...As he got into the research, fourteen years later, on what would prove to be a brilliantly deflationary piece on the overrated Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union, he came to see that Baldwin was a classic—and unrepentant—example of the sort of thirties left-liberal he himself had once been: a severe critic of the U.S.'s shortcomings, an automatic apologist for the Soviet Union, and a generous supporter of Communist-front organizations...