Dwight Macdonald: sunburned by ideas.

At a 1980 symposium at Skidmore College set in motion by a normally portentous essay by George Steiner about the death of culture in America, Dwight Macdonald, long established as a slashing critic of popular culture and politics, sitting on a panel on "Film and Theatre in America," seemed to have little of interest to say. He was seventy-four years old and a fairly serious boozer who had written almost nothing of interest for more than a decade. He seemed the intellectual equivalent of the boxer who has taken way too many shots to the head. His death by congestive heart failure was two years away. Reacting against the tendency in the discussion to take current-day movies and plays seriously, Macdonald emitted--one almost hears him muttering --a remark that could stand as the epigraph for his long career in intellectual journalism: "When I say `no' I'm always right and when I say `yes' I'm almost always wrong."

Dwight Macdonald was the intellectual par excellence, which is to say without any specialized knowledge he was prepared to comment on everything, boisterously and always with what seemed an unwavering confidence. He was the pure type of the amateur, and gloried in the status. And why not? "What's wrong with being an amateur," one easily imagines him saying. "Look where the professionals have got us."

Perhaps this is too much in the spirit of put-down. But then this was also Macdonald's reigning spirit, and possibly it is contagious. Answering a reader who accused him of taking a snide tone in an article on the Ford Foundation in The New Yorker in 1954, he put the blame for the article's tone on himself, writing: "after all, I've done a lot of `snide' writing in my time, [and] am indeed rather an SOB, on paper at least."

I once greatly admired Dwight Macdonald, and I esteemed precisely that unforgiving, relentless son side of him above all. As a graduate of Mencken University, with a major in what I took to be anti-BS and a minor in radical politics, I thought Macdonald, when I first came across his writing in the late 1950s, next in succession to H. L. Mencken himself. To read Macdonald on the barbarity of General George S. Patton, the goofy gadgetry of Mortimer J. Adler's Syntopicon to the Great Books, the depredations upon the King James Bible committed by its new English translators was to hear melodious bells go off and have the sky fill with fireworks.

Macdonald got away with much that he did through style. The trick of this style was to be sharp and intimate simultaneously. He wrote to a correspondent that the secret to successful lecturing was to speak as if talking to no more than three or four people, and he seemed to write the same way. His general tone was that of the unconnable addressing the already highly skeptical. He never condescended to his readers, assuming that they were on his intellectual level. A brilliant counterpuncher, specializing in mockery of his opponents, he wrote unshapely essays in which the best things were often to be found in ungainly asterisk footnotes. His witticisms seemed truth-bearing. The first sentence of his article on the Ford Foundation ran: "The Ford Foundation is a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some."

Born in 1906, the son of a father who was a lawyer and a mother with social pretensions, Dwight Macdonald was by background upper-middle class. He was a prep school boy (Exeter) and an Ivy League man (Yale), whose first job out of school was in the executive training program at Macy's. Yet straight out of the gate he was a rebel, antagonizer division. At Exeter, at fourteen, he and a friend formed a group called The Hedonists, whose motto was "epater les bourgeois." Although as a young man he held many of the prejudices of his social class--racism, anti-Semitism--a strong belief in religion was not among them. "Literature and knowledge, wisdom and understanding, intellect, call it what you will, is my religion." These would be the gods he worshipped all his life.

"I have a prose mind," the young Dwight Macdonald wrote in college. "I want to write serious criticism." At first, though, he was swept away by the vigor of businessmen, whom he found "were keener, more efficient, more sure of their power than any college prof I ever knew." Upon discovering he had no mind for business, he took up a notion he found in reading Spengler: that there were Men of Truths and Men of Action, and he was dearly among the former. Even then he liked to have an idea--not yet an ideology--in support of any move he made.