Here and Now

...that grotesque care with which he read his New York Times each day...

...Obviously, were Mr...

...Macdonald devotes considerable space to a humorous listing of the typical activities to which he gave his time—those funny, funny five-page letters to the Nation...

...And now we look for Mr...

...Macdonald was committed, but merely his own radical stance...

...But it is much, much more—modest as it is—than the document of one experience of radical politics...

...those bizarre controversies with mad fellow-intellectuals...

...In a survey of the '30s, he says not a word of the Spanish War...

...the political developments in Europe and the hope with which one looked to revolution in Germany, and the despair with which one saw the defeat of hope in the first triumphs of Hit-lerism...

...Always there must be the new beginning, always the fresh start with nothing in the bank to get launched with, always the same mistakes to be made again...

...This is what is so dismaying...

...those queer exercises gathering names for petitions...

...Macdonald calls his memoir "Reminiscence of Politics Past" and gives it the rather arch subtitle, "A Backward Glance O'er Roads Once Travell'd More Than Now...

...He mentions the Moscow Trials...

...Macdonald was a member of the Trotskyite party...

...Certainly no one would accuse Mr...

...Macdonald should cede the space he gives to Trotsky's opinion of Mr...

...HERE AND NOW By Diana Trilling Dwight Macdonald's Reminiscences Of Radical Politics Before the War The March issue of Encounter contains the first instalment of a two-part memoir of Dwight Macdonald's experience of radical politics in the '30s and '40s...

...Macdonald has moved with notable speed from one position to another...

...Macdonald moved he left behind him an attitude which he considered compromised or compromising, and advanced to a position which he conceived to be the most "radical" and intransigent available at the moment...

...But he makes no attempt to describe their impact on American liberalism and radicalism, or to assess the frail power of truth as against the deep emotional need for faith...

...tion of revolt which issued, finally, in a kind of anti-anti-revolutionism whose very lack of program presumably testified to its absolute moral integrity...

...It was of the essence of this progression that each time Mr...

...The Russian trials are an occasion only for the recollection that Mr...

...Macdonald's reminiscence but the contrary: It is the fact that Mr...

...Trilling, who edited the Viking Portable D. H. Lawrence, has written for Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Glamour, Partisan Review, Commentary and numerous other journals...

...Macdonald was associated with the Committee for the Defense of Trotsky...

...There was no history to which he contributed, no self formed by the experience of his past...

...By 1941, he was quarreling with the Old Man himself...

...At Exeter, he tells us, he was a literary esthete and wore batik ties...

...But of what was so overwhelmingly and dramatically happening in the '30s—the suffering and fear of the first years of that decade...

...He is a witty man, with an apparently undiminished pleasure in his own humorous capacities, which is always appealing...

...Well, Mr...

...the grim idiot face which capitalism presented to so many of Mr...

...Instead, Mr...

...Macdonald of being a prig, not even when he has been most occupied in terrorizing his section of the intellectual community...

...Even in a generation peculiarly exposed to the shifting winds of political doctrine, Mr...

...He has at last come forward with his own revelation that one can be the most politically engaged of persons and yet the least involved with politics...

...and he communicates a boyish innocence which almost obscures his instinct to put the rest of us at a moral disadvantage...

...But when he comes to reconstruct the experience, he can give it no value whatsoever—no objective value and no meaning in terms of his personal growth...

...Usually we think of Mr...

...Yet, it is not an excess of vanity which troubles me in Mr...

...We could therefore have guessed that what constituted his guarantee of virtue was, simply, the amount of rebelliousness or intransigence he felt he was asserting...

...There is no recollection of promises made or taken, no sorrow over the failure of promise...

...His is a light hand, and before we are wholly aware of his wish to assert his moral ascendancy we are likely to have been charmed by his good spirits...

...For here is a man of intelligence, gift, and even ardor, who has spent more than twenty years now in one kind or another of radical politics...

...But he has no right to tell a new generation that the radical response of the '30s was this empty a gesture, a response to nothing...

...And, indeed, he does remind us, in a sentence, that 1930-36 were years of economic failure and of Roosevelt's farm program, the NRA, the Wagner Act and unemployment...

...Archness is not exactly the mood we expect from the former editor of Politics...

...that so it is we define our innocence— by our refusal to capitalize on experience, by the thoroughness with which, from generation to generation, we rid ourselves of everything that went before...

...Reminiscence of Politics Past" is a betrayal of history and of its author's contemporaries...

...It looks, rather, like the same old American story: There is nothing to be learned from the past...

...Macdonald so thoroughly denudes life, robbing everything, including himself, of importance...

...If we are to be morally bullied, it is of course preferable that it be done cheerfully and in a nice prose like Mr...

...Macdonald's contemporaries...

...it is one of his charms...

...Certainly for some time now his radicalism has had no content which could properly be called political...

...We might even have conjectured that perhaps it was not politics to which Mr...

...Over the years, nevertheless, the question has raised itself in the mind of at least one reader: What gives this man the right to come it over us with so much conviction that his political attitudes are more courageous and incorruptible than ours...

...It is a story of American culture, the document of a culture without memory...

...There has been only the emoHere (and now) we inaugurate a new feature column, to appear twice a month, in which Diana Trilling will comment on political, literary and cultural subjects of her ¦ choice...

...By 1939, Mr...

...For I cannot suppose that his career as a radical intellectual was this empty of connection with reality...

...Macdonald is depressed because a newer generation is so ignorant of the radicalism which attracted the intellectuals of an earlier decade, and so he sets about recalling the political experience of the '30s...

...This is by way of preparation for his graduation to the staff of Fortune magazine and to his first awareness of social forces in the early years of the Depression...

...Macdonald as an uncommonly skilful journalist, of a high order of moral earnestness...

...We grant the memoirist his natural right to vanity, but surely, if there is no other room for mention of the Spanish War, Mr...

...Mac-donald has literally nothing to say, and less than nothing to suggest...

...Macdonald is a man singularly lacking in self-consciousness...

...Macdonald to explain to those who came after us some of the social, economic and political determinants of the radicalism which dominated our intellectual culture in the '30s...

...At Yale, he got into trouble with the authorities for questioning the competence of William Lyons Phelps to teach Shakespeare...

...Even in the New Yorker, where he has written frequently and well, and where he most recently did a series on the Ford Foundation, he manages to suggest a purity of moral purpose which is no less intimidating for being latent in his content rather than overt in his style...

...And always the implicit assumption that this is the way it should be, this American way of ours...

...And despite what I have said about the source of his instinct to radicalism, I believe it is a betrayal of Mr...

...Macdonald regards his political past as a folly or an aberration...

...We cannot object, though I think we should disagree, if Mr...

...In this first instalment, he covers the period from his school and college days to the year 1941...

...Macdonald's reminiscence only a matter of his own commitment, or lack of commitment, to political ideas—a story of the strange fate of a very engaging and talented person-in-politics named Dwight Macdonald—1 would not write about it as I am writing here...

...the concentration of all one's imagination of progress and enlightenment in one's image of the Soviet Union, and the support given these generous fantasies by Roosevelt's rejection of the old attitudes of conservatism—of all this and so much more that was happening in the politics and culture of that time Mr...

...The answer should not have been too hard to find...