Dwight Macdonald's Legacy

...At least since the '20s, everyone has been under enormous pressure to specialize, to compartmentalize and become a cog in the social mechanism...

...Despite the nebulousness of Politics' politics, it managed to corral an impressive collection of writers, includin'g Albert Camus, Simone Weil, Nicola Chiaromonte, Paul Goodman, and such youngsters as Richard Hofstadter, Oscar Handlin, James Agee, C. Wright Mills, Irving Kristol, Marshall Mc-Luhan, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, etc., etc...

...and a reader picking up an article by Macdonald could always be sure he would encounter an individual intelligence grappling with the issue at hand, a human being— an erudite and often very funny one—behind the words...

...Though he continued to rail againstU.S...

...Irving Ho we has written about him that "at each point in his life [he] made a specialty out of mocking his previous beliefs...

...The son of a not-too-prosperous New York attorney, Macdonald, upon graduating from Yale in 1928, joined an executive-training program at Macy's, but quickly grasped that an esthete who idolized Oscar Wilde was not cut out to be a necktie salesman...

...He wrote from the "immediate experience," developing his ideas on the run, as it were, never looking back...

...Like others on the staff, Macdonald drifted steadily Leftward, passing rapidly through liberalism to Marxism...

...Named, appropriately, Politics, it first appeared in 1944 as vaguely Marxist, with an emphasis on the "vaguely," and folded five years later as more-or-less pacifist-anarchist, more anarchist, less pacifist...

...Among them, Macdonald was one of the most humanistic, ironically, I believe, because he did not let his intellect get in the way of his mind...

...The bouilloncubehad evaporated...

...The square peg of the New Left's populism cannot be forced into the round hole of Macdonald's elite individualism...

...Macdon-ald's radicalism revived somewhat in the '60s, as he ran around trying to get himself arrested for encouraging draft resisters, but the spark was gone...

...In A Critical American: The Politics of Dwight Macdonald (Archon Books, 179 pp., $19.50), the first study of Macdonald's career to appear since his death three years ago, Stephen J. Whitfield looks to see what of permanence, if anything, can be gleaned from half a century of whirling dervish polemics...

...It seems even rarer today...

...I n the grubby, cynical Reagan era, Whitfield's enthusiasm for Macdonald's hard-nosed idealism is praiseworthy...

...When a splinter group led by Max Shacht-man formed the Workers Party, Macdonald went along...

...The chip proved no more flexible than the old block, however, and after expending 8,000 well-chosen words condemning the Shachtmanites' dogmatism Macdonald quit the Workers Party as well...

...By 1936, when he left Fortune and a handsome $10,000-a-year salary, he was "leaning toward a confused brand of fellow-traveling Communism...

...Too much of a maverick for the Stalinist straitjacket, he became an editor of the independently Leftist Partisan Review while shopping around for a resting place congenial to his anti-Communist radicalism...

...It was one of the most characteristic—and charming—moments in his career, also one of the most quixotic...

...Macdonald himself told Paul Goodman that he " couldn't remember anything more than three months back...

...By themid-1940s, hewashisown majority of one, as impacted as poor Weisbord...

...As it did for many others, Trotskyism beckoned...

...With the help of a Yale classmate, he landed a job on Henry Luce's new magazine, Fortune— a more suitable position for an aspiring writer and, once the Depression hit, an ideal perch from which to discover the contradictions of capitalism...

...This was a rare, refreshing quality in the period when Politics and Partisan Review were at their height...

...The young are as passionately prejudiced as their elders, and less well-informed...

...Even in the world of the mind, one is a patent attorney, a physical therapist or a literary critic, never a generalist who strives to be a whole person by asking the large, fundamental questions...

...Forced into choosing a dreary succession of lesser evils, he simply gave up, declaring, "Politics is a desert withouthope...

...In 1939 he joined the Socialist Workers Party, where almost immediately he attacked its leader, Leon Trotsky, for not being a true Trotskyist...

...The' Left,' new or old, is as alarmingly abstract in its political thinking as the' Right.'" Biologists have a term for what Whitfield detects: "isomorphism," a similarity of appearance between organisms of wholly different groupings...

...Goodman retained Macdonald's admiration into the Vietnam period, particularly when he was attacking the students for their mindlessness...

...In the autobiographical essay that serves as the Introduction to his Politics Past, Macdonald tells the story of the Revolutionary League of America, one of dozens of Leftist factions that sprang up in the hothouse atmosphere of the 1930s...

...One can also appreciate his desire to defend the '60s against the fashionably reactionary notion that all those peace marchers were either stoned dupes or Weathermen...

...If Macdonald's influence is lasting, it is not because of anything that happened in the '60s...

...I would say that today's Right-wing Libertarians can claim descent from Macdonald, at least in his anarchist phase, with far greater justice than the New Left...

...Politics did not die intestate: Its legacy was to be sustained, distorted and extended by heirs born at the time of the little magazine's half-life and committed to making operational ideas which Macdonald had already articulated...

...Two years later, in 1943, he left Parr/san Review in a dispute over the magazine's support for the War...

...Except for the fact that Macdonald was not the type to form a political group, he could have been writ-ingabout himself...

...Then there was a divorce, and the advance-guard of t he revolution was concentrated, like a bouillon cube, in the small person of Albert Weisbord...

...He seemed to enjoy staking out political positions, demolishing ideological opponents with his crystalline prose and acid wit, and then promptly changing his mind...

...Consistent he may not have been, honest he invariably was...

...But as analysis, A Critical American won't do...

...His point finally emerges in the next-to-last chapter, entitled "The New Left's Ancestral Voice...

...It is not enough to draw parallels between the magazine's stands and the pronouncements of the counterculture, especially when Whitfield concedes that in both cases positions and beliefs kept shifting (at times he seems to be comparing two clouds on a windy day...

...Now began Macdonald's serious immersion in politics...

...By the same token, the individuals Whitfield adduces are scarcely evidence of Politics' impact...

...In both his political commentary and his cultural criticism, he started not with his ideas about a subject but with his response to it...

...He observes that Politics' attacks on militarism, racism, bureaucracy, and technology were echoed by the student demonstrators of Berkeley and Columbia, and that several key figures of the New Left had Politics connections: influences like Goodman and Mills were important contributors, spokesmen like Staughton Lynd and Noam Chomsky were enthusiastic readers...

...The major part of the book is a lively game of follow-the-leader, as Whitfield pursues his subject's broken-field thinking...

...If the sin of rigidity never beset him, neither, his critics charged, did the virtue of consistency, and it is a legitimate question whether he had any ideas at all, or only a moralist's itch coupled with a cantankerous temperament...

...Just because a frog's structure resembles a bird's doesn't mean they belong to the same class...

...Everyone has the right to be stupid," Trotsky wrote from Mexico, "but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege...

...Yet Macdonald's own views could not withstand the buffeting they received from the events of the late '40s—the death camps, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Gandhi's assassination, the Berlin blockade...

...imperialism, his Marxism died with the advent of the Cold War, and his detestation of the Soviet Union squeezed the juice out of his pacifism...

...They remain models for anyone who prizes humanistic values...

...Taking his cue from the fact that the original name forPoliticswasNewLeft, Whitfield argues that far from being a dilettante iconoclast, the Macdonald of the '40s was actually the progenitor of the '60s radicals...

...Macdonald did what any intellectual worth his salt would do in that situation—he started a magazine...

...Writers & Writing DWIGHT MACDONALD'S LEGACY BY BARRY GEWEN Dwight Macdonald, one of the most talented journalist/critics our country has produced in this century, was not a person to sit still for very long...

...Lionel Trilling may have put his finger on Macdonald's significance as far back as 1946 when he stated that the Partisan Review critics distinguished themselves by their commitment to an undivided sensibility, aunion of politics and culture...

...Macdonald broke with Mills in the early '50s, before the sociologist wrote the books that brought him his fame with theyounger generation...

...In opposing the Vietnam War, Whitfield notes, Macdonald "wrote no essays with the sweep or flashing penetration of his Politics articles.' Approxmately three quarters of A Critical A meri-can is devoted to biography, and since Macdonald has already done the job almost as thoroughly and certainly more amusingly himself, a reader starts to wonder what Whitfield is getting at...

...True, Lynd and Chomsky read the journal, the latter going as far as to acknowledge its effect on his thinking, but so did Kristol and Glazer, and nowhere does Whitfield suggest a link to neoconservatism or, God forbid, Jack Kemp...

...The Partisan Review writers of Macdonald's day, old-fashioned men and women of letters wandering over the entire range of knowledge, asked the large questions...

...A reader would never guess from this book that in 1967 Macdonald was writing: "It'sail going down the drain...

...As a one-man performance, it remains unsurpassed, a tribute to Macdon-ald's intelligence, taste and journalistic acumen...

...The adherents of this sect steadily dropped off until the only people remaining were Albert Weisbord and his wife...