A Rebel in Defense of Tradition, Michael Wreszin

...He was at the heart of almost every major intellectual dispute of his time, writers as different as T S. Eliot and Norman Mailer acknowledged his influence He appears in countless literary memoirs, always arguing fiercely, surrounded by a brilliant circle of critics, poets, and novelists But he engaged himself so deeply with the issues of his day that he has barely outlived them The vigor of his political journalism, tracing the American Left's long romance with Marxism, is compromised by its polemical atmosphere In the 1950s he established his reputation as a serious critic of popular or "mass" culture But mass culture was to take its revenge on him, within a decade or so he had been eclipsed by Tom Wolfe and a younger generation of New Journalists By 1968, when he spoke at the Columbia University student riots (to the horror of Lionel Trilling and other faculty members) he was already something of a dinosaur Rather than seeking to redeem MacDonald, Michael Wreszin focuses on the extraordinary energy of his career, the miracle of his constant, restless transformations In the 1920s, as a snotty aesthete fresh out of Yale, he wrote for Fortune and published a literary magazine (Miscellany) on the side Within a few years he was putting so much Leninist theory into his analyses of the American steel industry that Henry Luce's editors rewrote them almost from scratch In 1936, at the age of thirty, he left Fortune to read Marx and write forTrotskyist periodicals, in another year he joined Philip Rahv and William Phillips m founding the Partisan 26 Review He was far too contentious to toe any party line, and before long Trotsky himself was lambasting MacDonald for advocating a "skepticism towards all theories, governments, and social systems " This skepticism remained the guiding star of his politics He could not abide dogma, and his political writing tended toward ethics rather than policy, at the war's end he repudiated the "scientific pretensions" of Marxism By that time he and his wife Nancy had been publishing their own journal, Politics, for two years The strain of that venture, combined with his failing marriage and increasingly troubled efforts to salvage some kind of radical politics, took its toll At the end of the decade MacDonald abandoned Politics and became a staff writer for the New Yorker where he began his assault on mass and mid-culture Popular or mass culture, he claimed, unlike traditional folk culture, was imposed from above by a profit-hungry ruling class The resulting "floods of trash" were bad enough, but the real threat was Midcult, an insidious blend of mass and high cultures that threatened to erode high cultural standards by aping them He cited T S Eliot, whose Notes toward a Definition of Culture had arrived at similar conclusions from the opposite end of the political spectrum, and he railed against Midcult's signatures "kitsch," the "builtin reaction," the groveling appeal to popular standards It was a catchy formula, and it made sense when applied to middlebrow magazines like Time and Life When used against Hemingway, MacLeish, and other contemporary authors, it became little more than a critical axe—something else MacDonald acquired a reputation for during the '50s There is some truth to Alfred Kazin' s claim that MacDonald and his fellow ex-Marxists "adore the subject of 'mass culture,' because it gives them the chance to show that the people were wrong, not themselves " But MacDonald never gave in to bitterness or shut his eyes to political realities In 1962 he chose to review a book by an obscure young socialist named Michael Harrington for the New Yorker Thanks largely to that review, Harrington's The Other America changed the prevailing view of poverty in this country and helped inspire the Kennedy and Johnson initiatives against it Wreszin reconstructs MacDonald's life with an admirable thoroughness He tends, however, to rely on cultural stereotypes (Dwight's "Waspish" behavior...

...and he does not do full justice to MacDonald's humor and verve as a writer That is a pity, because there are few writers like MacDonald left He could be sloppy, and he was often needlessly antagonistic But he was never sentimental or obscure or 27 pious—never Midcult At his best, his prose sings with a counterpoint of spontaneity and erudition that is rare...

...and his spirit, with all its wild, open-hearted gusto, animates their work as well as his own He remained open to the end, joining the student radicals and the antiwar movement, helping younger writers whenever he could...

...His generosity, like his energy, was legendary If his life has begun to seem foreign today, perhaps that is because the postwar intellectual culture m which he flourished, with all its fierce polemical passions, its sprawling energy, and range, is no longer with us...

...His essay on Joyce, for instance, mixes criticism with a hilarious account of his own youthful pilgrimage to the master in Pans His reviews often parody the style of his subject, as in the essay on Hemingway "He was a big man with a bushy beard and everybody knew him The tourists knew him and the bartenders knew him and the critics knew him too ." MacDonald's strengths as a writer— his humor, his versatility, his impatience with cant—became a kind of limitation in the end His life, as Wreszm tells it, gives a sense of powerful, undisciplined intelligence, the mind of a man who loved argument too much to sit down by himself for very long But he appears to have made an enormous difference in the lives of his peers...

...UP AGAINST THE WINDMILLS A REBEL IN DEFENSE OF TRADITION The Life and Politics of Dwight MacDonald Michael Wreszin Basic Books, $30, 590 pp Robert Worth D wight MacDonald embodied that lasting contradiction a radical whose principles—both political and literary—were conservative and nostalgic One of the great public intellectuals of his day, he helped to establish the Partisan Review and published the influential journal Politics out of his cramped Manhattan apartment...