Offbeat Political Writing
The Memoirs of a Revolutionist
By Dwight Macdonald
Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. 376 pp. $4.75.
Don’t be alarmed by the title! These are not the memoirs of a revolutionist. What surprised me most was to discover that the “revolutionary” interlude in Mr. Macdonald’s life was so brief. He did not begin to study Marxist literature until the late 30’s; he was a member of the Trotskyist movement for only two years (1939-1941); and by 1944, when he founded his own magazine, Politics, he was no longer a revolutionist at all, but an angry individualist and a kindly moral pacifist. This record, it seems to me, shows again how some people tend to exaggerate the significance of the brief interlude during which American intellectuals were experimenting with radical ideas. Mr. Macdonald’s professional life is securely anchored elsewhere. For seven years he was a staff writer for Fortune, and since 1949 he has been a staff writer for the New Yorker: both solid, respectable pillars of bourgeois society.
This book is largely a collection of editorials and articles which Mr. Macdonald wrote for Politics between 1944 and 1949. If you did not keep a file of your own copies, here is your chance to acquire some of the magazine’s best pieces between hard covers. If you have never heard of Politics before, the book will give you a glimpse into political writing that was re-freshingly off-beat and into a mind that, in those years, was delightfully nonconformist. This was Dwight Macdonald’s finest hour.
Politics was a remarkable publication, if for no other reason than that it was a kind of highly sophisticated family magazine. Mr. Macdonald was “editor, publisher, owner, proofreader, layout man and chief contributor. My then wife, Nancy, was the business manager.” Together they produced a magazine that was anything but slick and smooth; nor did it achieve financial success (average circulation: 5,000 copies). But since the Macdonalds ran their little periodical on an intensely personal basis, it also aroused a special feeling of participation and involvement among its readers, a sense of loyalty and loss that has lingered since the demise of Politics.
But the oddest thing about Politics—another source of its great charm—was that it was launched, not to praise, but to bury politics. Soon after he began to publish his own “political” journal, Dwight Macdonald seems to have discovered, perhaps to his own surprise, that he was through with politics. The political scene, he decided, was absurd or required, at most, a sophomoric intelligence: for if “all ‘practical’ politics tends to be reduced … to the conflict between the USA and the USSR,” this is the end of politics as a serious intellectual discipline as well. And the political situation looked increasingly ugly, brutal, and violent. At best, it presented a choice of the lesser evil. Hence Dwight Macdonald came to “support the political, economic, and military struggle of the West against the East,” which was a repudiation not only of his earlier Trotskyism but of his postwar pacifism as well. At worst, he withdrew from the political arena altogether because he was crushed by the hopelessness of the outlook in general: “Perhaps there is no solution any longer to these agonizing problems,” he wrote at the time of the Korean war. “Certainly, the actual workings of history today yield an increasing number of situations in which all the real alternatives (as against the theoretically possible ones) seem hopeless. The reason such historical problems are insoluble now is that there have been so many crimes, mistakes, and failures since 1914 . . . that by now there are no uncorrupted, unshattered forces for good left with which to work.”
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These sentiments fit into a familiar pattern. We now have a bulky literature—the analysis of which should certainly be worth a grant from some foundation—on the theme of the God that failed. What set Dwight Macdonald (for a time at least) apart from the writers of this literature was that he attempted to salvage something from the ruins of the past by giving Politics a new direction. Instead of political analysis in the traditional sense, he offered a unique and provocative mixture of political satire, moral exhortation, and sociological and cultural criticism. This, I think, was a sound move; for political “science” has become an academic and anachronistic discipline, useful for “educational” purposes, but almost meaningless in its theoretical and practical implications. Almost all the problems that were once called “political” now belong to a different context, psychological, sociological, and cultural. And so-called political choices involve big issues, like a person’s “way of life,” which must be defended again9t the prevailing political regime, whether it be a libertarian or totalitarian one. It is a pity that Mr. Macdonald could not sustain the new directions he gave to Politics; for they expressed his best talents and they fulfilled a much-needed function.
Political satire is almost extinct, which is perhaps only another symptom of the decline of politics itself; but Mr. Macdonald was very good at it. He was not a deep thinker, but a practising journalist; and he pulled some big boners, as in his analysis of the problem of Germany after the last war. He often misjudged the realities of a political situation because he was too preoccupied with the moral issues involved. But his critical faculties never failed him when he used them for the purpose of satirizing and lampooning the passing scene of national and international events. He kept a remarkable clipping service for off-beat material, and he was extraordinarily sensitive to, and indignantly aroused by, the cant, hypocrisy, and absurdity of pious rationalizations. He had a keen eye for the looking-glass world behind the appeal to reality; and in his finest writings he achieved the devastating trenchancy and bitterness that characterize the political satire of the early Mencken or Lincoln Steffens in this country, or of Carl von Ossietzky and Karl Kraus in Europe. Unfortunately we have nothing and nobody to take their places today.
A satirist is always a moralist; and Mr. Macdonald’s concern for politics was deeply moral. The longest pieces in this book deal with the problem of man’s responsibilities, both personal and social. His major quest was for a set of values which would provide an Archimedean point of “rootedness” against the perversions and decay of moral sensibilities. He was not successful in this search. He could not, it seems, reconcile the hard-headed part of his nature that was shaped by Marx, Trotsky, Freud, and Dewey with the soft-hearted element of his soul that drew him increasingly toward moral anarchists, pacifists, and religious minds like Jesus, Tolstoy, Thoreau, Gandhi, and Schweitzer. He realized that “in an age of social decay, it is only by rejecting the specific and immediate values that the writer can preserve . . . general and eternal values.” He saw that “the mental attitude known as ‘negativism’ was a good start”; but, alas, it is only a start and it is beset, from the beginning, by the shadow of nihilism.
Politics folded in 1949 when its editor confessed to feeling “stale, tired, disheartened and, if you like, demoralized.” The mood not only expressed a farewell to politics, but also the failure to solve the moral equation. Since this is so prevalent a mood in our culture, one cannot but sympathize with the plight of the individual who surrenders to it. Yet one cannot but wish that Dwight Macdonald might have been the exception; that he might have been able to defend the constructive function of satirical “negativism” instead of succumbing to the kind of positive “socio-cultural reportage” conducted in the pages of the New Yorker.
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