Our Best Journalist
Goodman, Paul
THE MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST, by Dwight Macdonald. Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, $4.75. This book, as a book, doesn't add much to the wealth of nations. It is foolishly inconsistent, not...
...They have been carefully chosen and skilfully organized to energize identification with the leader, the force that has "saved" them from themselves, that is from the sensible impulse to run away...
...Now this book is oddly called Memoirs...
...It is this unified group that gives him both his material and his tone...
...If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given...
...I am looking at something reproduced in a book which had its proper life for us as we read on the run...
...A critical journalist must take the headlines and the public responses to them as serious, as if these were the important events of the era, whatever interpretation he may then go on to make...
...Dwight once told me, but he will not remember, that he couldn't remember anything more than three months back— the period, I guess, for researching an assignment' and thinking it up with one's typewriter...
...His involvement is that of a welcome kibitzer rather than of a man determined to a goal of action or truth...
...I still think that Politics was the best magazine in my adult memory...
...What an astonishingly inhuman proposition...
...Walter Goldwater, 509 Fifth Ave., New York 17, N.Y...
...86...
...by October 1945, discussing war-making itself, Dwight allows himself the sentence: "Extend civilian values throughout the armed forces...
...He is not encumbered by the long view...
...A journalist is not encumbered with learning, with history, or classics or science...
...also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner...
...whereas the organization of a book is the essence 82 of the subject...
...Included is the relevant statistical data on the trade union movements in 88 affiliated, and 19 associated, countries, with several exceptions that are explained in a brief preface by J. H. Oldenbroek, General Secretary of the ICTFU...
...he is sensitive and has decent, livable Anglo-Saxon prejudices...
...and and I am not especially depressed to find him, who started with Luce, now with The New Yorker...
...Yet most of the pieces collected here were —I do not mean "seemed"—very good when they appeared...
...County...
...Therefore the worst fate that could befall a journalist is to have his pieces collected, for how, on what principle, will they hang together...
...and William James saw that the problem was to find a moral equivalent...
...But let me dwell a moment on an example of excluding something—a mass-sentiment—because it is not what "we" feel is proper...
...31-1109100...
...STATEMENT REQUIRED BY THE ACT OF AUGUST 24, 1912, AS AMENDED BY THE ACTS OF MARCH 3, 1933, AND JULY 2, 1946 (Title 39, United States Code, Section 233) SHOWING THE OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION OF DISSENT, published quarterly at New York 1, N.Y...
...it is not...
...Even old Kant, who was a useful friend to peace on earth, listed soldiers in battle as one of the few things that are sublime...
...And still more strikingly, the autobiographical introductory essay was mainly put together (this is my hunch) by consulting his scrapbook of old memoranda and articles, arranging them chronologically, and drawing from them a fine new— though already dated—article about the current state of the "intellectuals, in which conversation-group he classes himself...
...What shall we say of that title, The Me moirs of a Revolutionist, when Dwight doesn't even have a memory...
...85 All the same, Dwight is a fine writer and that is because he is a very personal, sui generis, kind of journalist...
...Brief histories of the unions and some pertinent documents are included...
...But subjectively, is this the way in which a man remembers his life...
...t5.50.—Published under the auspices of the ICTFU by the Lincoln-Prager International Yearbook Publishing Company and distributed by Maxwell and Co., this volume is an essential source book for any library which aims at thoroughness of research material in the contemporary labor movement...
...for Dwight's job or connection-tenure averages, let us say, five years, which is not above par for an honest man who is adaptable and really aims to please...
...His content conveys not much, but his manner conveys always himself...
...There is a complete name index...
...He is never revolting and not very often stupid...
...For the journalist must have an opinion, an editorial line...
...and Partisan Review was readable when Dwight Macdonald was an editor...
...This is an anticlimactic end to these memoirs of a revolutionist, but there it is, and there I am...
...But the concepts have no independent life and growth—they have no scientific or practical value...
...3. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 per cent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: None...
...Dwight is a literate journalist who employs a wide range of concepts, and a committed journalist who expresses many feelings, from comedy to indignation...
...1944) he had quoted and explored these very observations, saying, "One tends to overlook them and therefore to expect more resistance to the process of war from soldiers than actually takes place...
...This qualification is essential, because it is impossible to be learned in these ways without succumbing to having a perspective on the events that everybody is discussing...
...II A journalist has no memory...
...Reflect a moment and make comparisons among the journalists and you will see how excellent is Dwight...
...But again, there it is...
...A journalist smugly assumes that his conversation-group comprises all the thinking or the right-feeling people that there are...
...4. Paragraphs 2 and 3 include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting...
...PAUL GOODMAN BOOKS RECEIVED YEARBOOK OF THE INTERNATIONAL FREE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT, 1957-1958...
...Thus, I say this book is not informative...
...Benjamin Elshitz, Notary Public, State of New York Residing in N.Y...
...But of course such thinking with the typewriter, instead of the head, heart, and hand, cannot rise above its source in the headlines and the mixture of polemical opinions...
...I hope sometime to have the occasion to review one of his pieces when it is hot, and I am hot, and to show how good it is...
...To quote our author, who has just been describing how one of his intellectual adventures petered out, "The prodigal son must have found home life, once the fatted calf was eaten, as boring as ever...
...But most often he eschews such flyers, they are mere decoration...
...there are the same reaction-formations, displacements, prejudices, and scientific fantasies...
...Thus, Dwight says, "All our scripts were Marxian," "Then we believed in revolution and now we don't," "The coming war was our trump card," etc...
...his authors—excepting always Herzen—are those whom the right people are currently quoting, and he is intelligent and grasps their topical relevance quickly and accurately...
...I am not so sure, however, that he can write a book at all...
...Signed): Stanley Plastrik, business manager...
...the libertarians and the philosophic conservatives, two often-meeting and by no means incompatible extremes...
...It is only rarely that he makes your hair stand on end with remarks like "The Greeks...
...His understanding of the term "politics" does not seem to have grown with experience...
...There is no paradox...
...in another irate at the de-politicalizing of the war...
...these liberal values...
...If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its namr and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given...
...I am reminded of Ruskin's complaint: "I show men their plain duty and they reply that my style is charming...
...Dwight quotes in extenso General Patton s Farewell Speech, and he calls it "affected .. . 84 and empty...
...Dwight says he is "unable to write a book in cold blood," implying, I think, both that he needs the heat of involvement and that there is something clammy about the development of a thesis in "isolation...
...A journalist practices what the ancients used to call a Universal Art, one that has no proper subject matter...
...Then let me here, since we have before us such a remarkably fine specimen, look for a few properties of the Journalist...
...1945) The speech is not affected and empty and in its origin has nothing to do with war-making...
...Of course the book is not memoirs, but a collection of old pieces of journalism...
...one must conclude that there was no experience...
...Clk's New York Reg...
...An historian or humanist finds that his present is not the other people's present, and a scientist is not even seeing what the other people see...
...He is fearless and independent...
...One would think Dwight had never thought about war and fighting...
...Thus in one piece he is anti-political...
...Commission Expires March 30, 1959...
...The tone of the article is unchanged, perhaps a little tired (plus c'est la mgme chose, plus ca change...
...and is it possible that they carry their readers with them...
...Except for the first paragraph, which is cold, the speech consists of sentiments common in any bar in America, among those warding off the dread of emasculation...
...1. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers are Publisher, Walter Goldwater, 509 Fifth Ave., New York 17, N.Y...
...Except that eleven months is longer than a three-month memory-span can cope with...
...Freud's fear and wonder, as he went deeper in the dreams and speculated about the carnage around him, made him postu late a death-wish...
...By "we" he explicitly means all intellectuals of a radical bent, all those who "were thinking at all...
...Aug...
...Only the last sentence betrays an emotion: In recent years I have devotedmost of my time to The New Yorker, where I have been able to write the kind of social-cultural reportage and analysis that now interests me more than political writing...
...he gives information they would have overlooked...
...London, Wl...
...he is intelligent, scrupulous, and unusually free from spite...
...He never fails to be fair to the immediate facts and at least decent in his sentiments...
...III I seem to be saying, what is not newsy, that a journalist is not an historian, not a scientist, not a philosopher, not a statesman...
...In the nature of the case, since I am writing in cold blood, all my sentences will seem cold-blooded...
...Editor, None...
...Et cetera, et cetera...
...What the devil did they use to teach at Phillips Exeter and Yale...
...Or how could he become absorbed enough to write a book...
...that is, he didn't learn anything after all...
...he is not afraid to speak his piece...
...the readers want to know what their right feeling is this quarter...
...the others are either hoi polloi or odd-balls...
...In this respect journalism is like television...
...Dwight is an excellent journalist— I am not well-informed, but I cant think of any better...
...he is outgoing...
...Who...
...in another he talks of a neo-conservatism...
...and he seems to have no experience of the passion of the intellect, of learning and adding to learning, of catching a definition and exhausting the consequences, of affirming a conclusion because it follows...
...that is, he has ruled out from possible re:evance the sentiments not only of the majority but of those who were a good deal wiser than Dwight and were not making the same errors, e.g...
...Let me say that in the analysis of one kind of phenomenon Dwight seems to me to display much more scientific acumen: the squeeze-play in his account of the Warsaw uprising or divide-and-rule in his account of Badoglio and De Gaulle...
...Maxwell and Co...
...The beautiful fellowship of the world of journalists is that those who have in one tendency been discredited by events, find themselves together on the masthead in a new tendency...
...5. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the 12 months preceding the date shown above was: (This information is required from daily, weekly, semiweekly, and triweekly newspapers only...
...Good...
...yet the pieces, in their matrix of heated talk, gave new material...
...He raises that kind of conversation to a better level, with broader perspective, better words...
...The feelings, correspondingly, do not ring as if having them makes any difference to the man...
...Such journalists are indispensable in our conversation-groups...
...How to explain it...
...He has animal spirits...
...Nothing adds up...
...This book is not entertaining (although it is not dull...
...Whence would he get the plot, the inner motion, of a book...
...The advantage of having no memory is that one accumulates no experience, one doesn't learn anything, and therefore can journalistically confront every new situation with the same fresh attitude, consulting the morgue for background data...
...Why this is so I am not prepared to explain...
...This smug conceit of being in the know-group, however, must not be confused with the harmless vanity that belongs to Dwight as a very fine and confident writer and craftsman...
...and a reflection of what war-making has done to the personality of Patton...
...he is honest...
...found the State never worthy of a man's respect," or "The Marxist has a richer intellectual tradition than the pacifist," or "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity...
...The gist is that intellectuals are now a-political...
...Business manager, Stanley Plastrik, 509 Fifth Avenue, New York 17...
...The case is that we here have a terrible problem that nobody knows how to solve, that must yet be subjected to endless analysis, that must be alleviated piecemeal...
...he does not have Xray eyes...
...Managing editor, None...
...It is foolishly inconsistent, not often thought-provoking, not informative (except perhaps to the young who have never heard of these goings-on), and hardly even entertaining...
...The next property of a journalist I find less amiable, but no doubt it is equally essential and entailed in the others...
...He thinks with his typewriter about the current material and in the melee of opinions of the readers he hopes to reach...
...Now this line of thinking is not inaccessible to Dwight, for in another context ("Notes on the Psychology of Killing," Sept...
...But such fellows (take Croce, a philosophic "liberal"), grounded more solidly in the nature of things and therefore less deluded by maya, could make little stir nor have much exciting to say in the world of intellectual journalism...
...2. The owner is (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediatelv thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I per cent or more of total amount of stock...
...yet once the pieces were sprightly...
...I take it that the second part of the title is meant• in fun...
...obviously one could extend the list...
...Sworn to and subscribed before me this 1st day of October, 1917...
...Now Dwight wears his ignorance gracefully...
...It is a bad subject for journalism...
...83 it is with jeopardy that a young fellow has learned to know and love great works of art, for this gives him scruples and makes him inept...
...and it is by a sure instinct that a good journalist helps them not to exist...
...Not thoughtprovoking, yet the pieces improved the level of discussion...
...As a journalist-critic, coping with opinions and headline-facts his organization of the material is clear and telling, but it reveals nothing of the essence of the subject...
...In many pieces the analysis is Marxian, yet in others he totally rejects Marxian analysis without giving an alternative analysis...
...Dwight is one of our best journalists, but what is a journalist...
...His personal vanity even somewhat alleviates his groupconceit, although it makes him somewhat embarrassingly, though justifiably, enthusiastic for his own formulations...
...624 pp...
...Each one is devoted to organizing the opinions of an occasion sufficient for the occasion, but not likely grounded in anything underlying...
...for October 1, 1957...
Vol. 5 • January 1958 • No. 1
