Diana Trilling's The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling and Michael Wrersin's A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald
Scialabba, George
THE BEGINNING OF THE JOURNEY: THE MARRIAGE OF DIANA AND LIONEL TRILLING, by Diana Trilling. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993. 442 pp. $24.95. A REBEL IN DEFENSE OF TRADITION: THE LIFE AND...
...to him it mattered not at all if the institution lived or died—he had found himself a revolution...
...THE BEGINNING OF THE JOURNEY: THE MARRIAGE OF DIANA AND LIONEL TRILLING, by Diana Trilling...
...He was "Yogi Macdonald" (Rahv and Phillips), a "sentimental dilettante" (James Burnham), "Bohemian . . . irresponsible" (Sidney Hook), "the 13th disciple" (Howe), a "kibitzer . . . thinks with his typewriter" (Paul Goodman), "has made a fetish of confusion and drift" (C...
...Their apparent mastery in pronouncing on both culture and politics, and in relating one set of judgments to the other, now seems as attractive as it does unattainable...
...A REBEL IN DEFENSE OF TRADITION: THE LIFE AND POLITICS OF DWIGHT MACDONALD, by Michael Wrersin...
...Partly, perhaps, because they embodied, conceivably for the last time in American history, a venerable modern ideal, practiced also by the philosophes and praised by Goethe and Marx: vielseitigkeit or manysidedness...
...Having praised The Beginning of the Journey, I must here parenthesize to defend Macdonald against a more particular reproach in it...
...Even Trotsky chimed in: "Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege...
...These remarks probably contributed as much to Columbia's survival as anything Mrs...
...Unlike some readers of The Beginning of the Journey, I have no trouble believing that Mrs...
...The enchanting combination of lightness and gravity that he regularly attained, she rarely attained...
...But they proceeded from a sound intuition—that war is the health of the state—which his polemical opponents gave no evidence of sharing...
...It required moral poise, a kind of ideological negative capability...
...Eliot's definition of the function of criticism) "the correction of taste...
...The cold-war blueprint NSC 68, the existence of high-level State Department and Council on Foreign Relations planning groups that in effect designed the Pax Americana, and the evolution of huge, uncontrollable national security bureaucracies originating in this period also seem, in retrospect, to validate Macdonald's confused intuitions about the untrustworthiness of governments...
...Nothing was easier than to be angry at Macdonald, whether in or out of print, but it was difficult to stay angry at him...
...Their versatility was astonishing...
...Nor do I think that our universities should be degraded to service as entering wedges to pry open our society for the benefit of social revolution...
...In "The Root Is Man" (1946) and elsewhere, he confessed his disenchantment with all the available forms of organized political action...
...There are generous selections from Dwight's correspondence, most notably with Nicola Chiaromonte...
...It would be a pity if Columbia became another Latin American type of university in which education is impossible because student strikes and political disruptions have become chronic...
...But did the Trillings ever again raise their voices on behalf of their homeland's workers...
...I think so...
...In the decades since Macdonald resigned as a revolutionist, systematic social theory, both liberal and radical, has lumbered around to an understanding of the strategic importance of mass culture and moral psychology...
...For fervor we now have routine moralizing...
...She herself is her own most memorable creation, or re-creation...
...The thirties and forties (even more than the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties) confronted political critics with dilemmas to which one, perhaps the only, honest response was confusion and despair...
...She dramatizes it all marvelously, with impeccable moral delicacy and without a quaver of self-pity...
...He might have added that such a man's less brave and imaginative contemporaries will mock his homelessness...
...Macdonald initially opposed American participation in World War II, believing that capitalist governments could not effectively prosecute the war without themselves veering toward fascism...
...He justified this flight from politics with an eloquent 1950 antimanifesto: The scale of things is too big, the levers of power too far removed from people like us (and perhaps 288 • DISSENT Books from people like Stalin and Truman), the mood of the general population, after generations of Pavlovian conditioning by industrialism, world wars,and state bureaucracies, too demoralized and apathetic to respond to our appeals...
...A gifted singer, she came down with a psychosomatic illness that foreclosed a musical career...
...But for all Wrersin's thoroughness and judiciousness, Stephen Whitfield's much shorter A Critical American (1984) is still the best introduction (apart from Macdonald) to Macdonald...
...He and I quarreled during this period . . . he found my indignant refusal to help the SDS 'hilarious' —what more laughable than to want a university to endure...
...Trilling in good measure formed her husband's prose style (see, for one example among several that make this claim plausible, her superb essay on Virginia Woolf in Claremont Essays...
...There was, of course, never any doubt on that score about Dwight Macdonald, and there are fewer surprises in A Rebel in Defense of Tradition...
...He quotes Alexander Herzen on "two Russian liberals who made their peace with Czar Nicholas I: 'I shall be told that under the aegis of devotion to the Imperial power, the truth can be spoken more boldly...
...His versions of the 1949 Waldorf-Astoria Conference and Macdonald's stint at Encounter are full and entertaining...
...Whatever they may have disagreed about (practically everything), the New York Intellectuals seem to have been virtually unanimous in regarding Macdonald with exasperated condescension...
...Can so many and diverse eminences have been wrong...
...But for the most part he was what he reads like, decency itself, universally liked even if not always (by truly serious people, that is) respected...
...Diana Trilling is a New York intellectual (emerita) and so might have been expected to produce either a brilliant, contentious, unreliable, and selfserving portrait of those fraught decades or (depending on where one's ideological sympathies lie) a brilliant, contentious, and illuminating one...
...It was Macdonald and his fellow contributors to Politics who documented and denounced all these things and so in a small way redeemed the honor of American intellectuals, not the Partisan Review "realists" (nor Diana Trilling, who in The Beginning of the Journey rebukes even the latter for their insufficient partisanship...
...She has confounded expectations...
...and his late-life writer's block makes painful reading...
...The pacifist and socialist writings of today are to those of two generations ago as hay is to grass...
...It is difficult to understand why, except to the terminally tough-minded, any of this should have sounded frivolous, irresponsible, quietist, or defeatist...
...The need to make sense of these traumas was widely felt...
...In the Age of Information, mastery even of a single field is an implausible aspiration, and casual authority over a whole range of them an anachronistic one...
...He had no connection with Columbia...
...What seems necessary," Macdonald wrote, after surveying in the preceding pages (and embracing in the previous decade) virtually every form of radical ideology, "is to encourage attitudes of disrespect, skepticism, ridicule towards the State and all authority, rather than to build up a competing authority...
...In the twenty-five years since Howe wrote the first and best retrospective ("The New York Intellectuals," Commentary, October 1968), one after another of them, like the players in Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony, has come forward with a valedictory and then bowed off the stage or returned quietly—for the most part—to his or her seat: Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, Howe himself, William Barrett, William Phillips (still fiddling away, but rallentando), Norman Podhoretz (likewise, molto agitato...
...The memoir ends in 1950...
...A fine, tortuous line separates the exquisite from the precious...
...Altogether, Hook-Burnham-Rahv-PhillipsKramerTrilling disparaging Macdonald strikes me as no less implausible than, say, James Gould Cozzens ridiculing D.H...
...His more dramatic predictions, at least, were mistaken and occasioned much sarcasm...
...It meant resisting the simplifying urgenSPRING • 1994 • 287 Books cies of war and cold war, admitting one's impotence and uncertainty, sitting tight, listening...
...he occasionally—for example, when exercised by Rahv's or Phillips's subtleties— tossed off an anti-Semitic crack...
...It's not as though there were practical alternatives, then or now...
...No wonder his fellow New York Intellectuals thought him wacky...
...for reason, the old stock of antiquated abstractions...
...and with so many people listening, even those tough-minded erstwhile historical materialists may be forgiven for forgetting about the structural irrelevance of radical ideas in a capitalist democracy—or, to put it less theoretically, for taking themselves so seriously...
...But I never suspected she had so much soul...
...Trilling said or did in the spring of 1968...
...Others, however, saw his floundering differently...
...And even at his most confused, discouraged, or doctrinaire, Macdonald criticized...
...Eventually he took to calling himself a "conservative radical" —partly, one suspects, to pull everyone's leg, but also because the standards he sought to apply to our culture, the strict standards of honest intellectual craftmanship, are at once deeply conservative and deeply subversive...
...No major historical or interpretive novelties in Wrersin, either, though a few nuggets...
...has begun to appreciate the ideological functions of cant, kitsch, crudity, and superficiality...
...I'm for such a revolution but I don't think it is a historical possibility in the foreseeable future in this country, and premature efforts to force it will merely damage or destroy such positive, progressive institutions as we have...
...On the contrary, as an invited speaker at Columbia's counter-commencement, Macdonald told the strikers: While I find your strike and your sit-ins productive, I don't think these tactics can be used indefinitely without doing more damage than good to the university...
...The Beginning of the Journey occasionally takes SPRING • 1994 • 285 Books sides, settles scores, dips into mere brilliance...
...Whereas Politics was read fervently in army camps and union halls across the country, and frivolous, irresponsible Yogi Macdonald more or less single-handedly launched the War on Poverty with "Our Invisible Poor," his essayreview of Michael Harrington's The Other America...
...But of course it was not really a flight from politics...
...Macdonald's career is an almost unimprovable gloss on Orwell's essay...
...But in its novelistic proportions and detail and its sustained inwardness, it is what few of those "Luftmenschen of the mind" (Howe) achieved or even attempted: a work of art...
...To this day, she is "unable to attend a concert or lecture or any public performance without at some moment having my throat tighten with the temptation to scream and thus divert, in a most unpleasant way, the attention of the audience from the onstage display to my own imprisoned self...
...And the NYints' summer frolics on Cape Cod are high comedy...
...Trilling's intelligence was always plain on every page she wrote (though I will presently quarrel with her politics...
...he was not the best of fathers...
...To think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration," Orwell wrote in "Politics and the English Language," "so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers...
...30.00...
...Macdonald himself was as sharp and effective a critic of Stalinism as anyone in the history of the American left...
...Fear— especially "fear of public display," induced by parental strictures—is the hidden theme of this formidable woman's life...
...Then, too, their pronouncements seemed to matter...
...he was too childlike, too seemingly innocent...
...Why, then, did they not speak it?' So, too, with the critical supporters of the war — why, then, do they not criticize...
...by do we still care about the New York Intellectuals...
...They fucked her up, her Mum and Dad...
...From the 1950s on, Macdonald mainly occupied himself with what he called (borrowing T.S...
...As a beginning writer of anonymous short reviews for the Nation, she almost gave up in terror, aborting her career, when offered a byline...
...Michael Wrersin is a diligent, conscientious, fair-minded scholar and so has produced a well-informed, even-handed, thoroughly useful and enjoyable biography...
...The intellectual," Irving Howe wrote in "This Age of Conformity" (1954), doubtless with his fellow New Yorkers in mind, "is a man who writes about subjects outside his field...
...Rarely can so many catastrophes—global economic depression, world war, the Gulag, the Holocaust— have thronged a single decade...
...Which we can't...
...Certainly he was innocent of the consequences of his ideas" (Diana Trilling, 1993...
...Czeslaw Milosz, for one, paid tribute to Macdonald as a successor to "Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville . . . a specific American type—the completely free man, capable of making decisions at all times and about all things strictly according to his personal moral judgments...
...At least one can say (adapting a celebrated formulation by Susan Sontag) that a reader of Politics probably would not have been surprised by these developments, while a reader of the postMacdonald Partisan Review very well might...
...Negativism" did not mean abandoning radical politics, just pruning it of empty pretensions and bad faith...
...I was an excessively fearful child," she announces on page three, and offers a mind-boggling, side-splitting list of things she feared, above all burglars, for whom she lay awake listening night after night...
...Lawrence or Mortimer J. Adler lecturing Wittgenstein...
...Trilling writes: "In 1968, with the outbreak of the campus disturbances at Columbia, [Macdonald] was at once on the scene, loaded for bear...
...Macdonald's "negativism" also earned him a good deal of superior admonition...
...In The Beginning of the Journey she attains something else: not quite a world but a milieu of lively, rounded, ridiculous, admirable characters, her family and Lionel's and their friends and colleagues during the first half of their marriage...
...It required genuine—rather than professed, which is a very common article—intellectual humility...
...Not that I can discover...
...A double pleasure, then, this publishing season: the first full biography of Macdonald and Diana Trilling's memoir of her life with Lionel...
...544 pp...
...Which is why I am no longer a pacifist, a socialist, or any kind of ist...
...Turgenev once observed that in politics, "the honorable man will end by not knowing where to live...
...To the live moral imagination, all times are dark times...
...it was a continuation of politics by other means...
...Certainly we have been a long time saying goodbye...
...Mrs...
...but the late thirties and early forties have a special pathos...
...He became, as Stephen Whitfield put it, mid-century America's Mencken as well as its Bourne, slaying various middlebrow dragons such as the pseudo-populist third edition of Webster's Dictionary, the vulgarized Revised Standard Version of the Bible, and the ineffably pompous University of Chicago Great Books project...
...But most surprising and affecting of all is her voice: at once elegiac and pungent, magnanimous and unsparing, dignified and intensely, dauntingly intimate...
...Lionel Trilling navigated that boundary expertly, almost infallibly...
...This inchoate, global skepticism allowed Macdonald to perceive the Allies' criminal misconduct: the mass bombings of civilians, the insistence on unconditional surrender, the refusal of asylum to the Jews, and "the annihilation of all European underground movements against fascism and Nazism, which succeeded because it was one of the very few items on which the Allied powers wholeheartedly agreed . . . [and] for which only now are we beginning to pay the full price" (Hannah Arendt, "Introduction to Politics Past," 1968...
...He has no field...
...Their only effect—if any—will be to stimulate a counterrevolution which will have far more chances of success...
...286 • DISSENT There are revelations—Lionel's rages and depressions, his blissful paternity, their lifelong financial difficulties, Diana's amazing misadventures in psychoanalysis...
...That essay prompted a young wiseguy named Irving Howe to send Politics a 6,000-word [!] critique, which Macdonald published in full...
...The only hope he could see, modest enough, "seems to be through symbolic individual actions, based on one person's insistence on his own values, and through the creation of small fraternal groups which will support such actions, keep alive a sense of our ultimate goals, and both act as a leavening in the dough of mass society and attract more and more of the alienated and frustrated members of that society...
...they may not have meant to, but they did...
...Although by and large I can't get enough of the genre, I'm glad Phillip Rahv didn't weigh in—though a fine and underappreciated literary critic, he was apparently not good at personal relations and was particularly embittered late in life...
...Well and good...
...He drank a lot, had a squeaky laugh, and drove recklessly...
...Actually, a similar question crossed my mind when I came upon Diana Trilling's remark in The Beginning of the Journey that after she and Lionel left a communist-front organization in disillusionment, "we never again raised our voices on behalf of the workers' homeland...
...Macdonald theorized a bit himself (his 1953 essay, "A Theory of Mass Culture," was fairly widely reprinted), but mostly he went in for practical criticism, with significant effects on American intellectual hygiene...
...Diana Trilling's style has often seemed to me a bit fussy...
...My chief regret has always been the absence of memoirs by two of my favorite NYints, Dwight Macdonald and Lionel Trilling...
...Basic Books, 1994...
...Wright Books Mills), a "truant" (William Barrett), a "dandy" (Hilton Kramer), a "boyish innocent . . . singularly lacking in self-consciousness" (Diana Trilling, 1957...
...But the pupil undeniably —she of course does not deny it— surpassed his teacher...
...Lionel's, too...
...Even if we could make them with the old fervor and rationality...
...SPRING • 1994 • 289...
Vol. 41 • April 1994 • No. 2
