On a trip to Paris, carrying a letter of introduction from a mutual acquaintance, Dwight Macdonald met James Joyce. Macdonald was accompanied by his good friend George L. K. Morris.
Recalling the “famous meeting,” Macdonald said “JJ” looked “like a haggard race-track tout.” Actually, he could not remember what the man was wearing, but he did remember that the conversation was halting. The famous author “seemed quite content to sit there in silence until we left.”
When the visiting Americans began to make their exit, Joyce suddenly came to life. He turned to Macdonald and said, “I understand you’re on Fortune magazine.” “Yes,” replied Macdonald. Then Joyce, by some lights the greatest writer in the English language at the time, asked Macdonald, a mere journalist not even thirty years old, if he might put in a word for a writer friend of his who was moving to New York and needed work. Macdonald said he would. Then Joyce “ushered us out—with considerably more cordiality than he had let us in.”1
Twenty-seven years later, the episode still struck Macdonald as bizarre. In more than one way, it was. Macdonald’s own feelings toward gainful employment were, in fact, a little eccentric.
Starting in 1935, writers across the country were being given jobs to keep them busy, at miserly rates, producing state guides for the Federal Writers Project. John Cheever and Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were on the literary dole, as was Jim Thompson, later author of The Grifters. Thompson was an Oklahoman who thought John Steinbeck a fine writer but that The Grapes of Wrath showed he actually knew little about the state.2 For her sojourns into swampy hideaways in Florida, the inimitable anthropologist-novelist Zora Neale Hurston collected a government check, as did the poet Kenneth Rexroth in San Francisco and a young Saul Bellow in Chicago. Few were too proud to be taking assignments, no matter how dull or unremunerative.
Dwight Macdonald, surely alone at the time, was slowly abandoning a lucrative position at a well-known and well-regarded publication to stalk the literary breadlines as a freelancer. He took umbrage at the suggestion that his great salary at Fortune meant anything to him. He and Nancy could very happily live on a fifth of such largesse, he proudly announced as they moved out of a posh apartment on Forty-Fourth Street and into a dark walk-up in Greenwich Village, which at the time well fit Lionel Abel’s description of New York City as the most interesting part of the Soviet Union.3
The literary light of the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald, had “cracked up” and was now making hungover confessions of what success had been like. Money and gilt-edged prose had given way to a drier landscape of dirt roads and American grit. Erskine Caldwell and John Steinbeck made hunger and survival their subjects. The modernism of Joyce was imported and redistributed by Faulkner, whose Bundrens knew poverty but not common sense as they carried their mother’s coffin on a horse-drawn southern journey, with crows flying overhead, to a final resting place. Fortune sent Macdonald’s friend James Agee to write about tenant farmers and Walker Evans to photograph them. But the magazine rejected Agee’s piece, later published with Evans’s photos as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.4 The new great satirist of American literature, Nathanael West, largely disregarded at the time, took aim not at the small-souledness of country club Republicans (à la Sinclair Lewis) but at the teary-eyed human animal and his utter naked frailty. In the earnest version, human existence was rendered tragic; in the less earnest version, it was pathetic to the point of embarrassment.
In this atmosphere, patriotism was “morally suspect” and “intellectually unfashionable.” There seemed to be “no reason to believe in the ‘viability’ of American capitalism.”5 Immediately after leaving Fortune, Macdonald wrote a three-part siege on Henry Luce in the pages of the left-wing magazine the Nation.6 He was now a confirmed member of those radicals to whom, as he had put it in his letter to Luce, small wonder, Time looked rather silly.
He met the fetching young troublemaker Mary McCarthy, who became an important friend. She described him in her short story “Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man.” His fictional version was shallow, bumbling, and likable, buoyed along by good looks, Ivy League bona fides, and the decency to be a radical without rubbing it in anyone’s face.
Macdonald threw parties, including one for the sharecroppers, serving cocktails “for free and in glasses,” noted McCarthy. After a few drinks, he would get into fights with Geoffrey Hellman of the New Yorker, whom he considered a Tory. Just as predictably, the two would make up during the week and reunite over drinks the next weekend. It was McCarthy, along with Margaret Marshall of the Nation, whose chance comments on the fraudulence of the Stalin trials prompted Macdonald to purchase a transcript and read them for himself.7
Macdonald was shocked that the Soviets hadn’t taken more care in framing the defendant Leon Trotsky. “Witnesses” made the absentee defendant out to be the perfect straw man, a living antithesis to every single policy Stalin undertook, a murderous villain bent on undoing the Russian Revolution. It was uncanny.
“Has Pravda been plugging for the newly won higher standard of living? Trotsky was plotting to lower it. Are Soviet citizens justly proud of their collectivized farms? Trotsky would break them up. . . . The Five-Year Plan? Trotskyites tried to wreck it. The Stakhanovite heroes? Trotsky murdered them. . . . Trotsky even planned to liquidate the intelligentsia, beginning presumably with himself.”
Macdonald joined the masthead of Partisan Review, then being revived by Philip Rahv and William Phillips as an anti-Stalinist literary journal after being set aside by the John Reed Clubs that used to fund it. He also brought in his friend Morris, who was a painter and a leading member of the American Abstract Artists—abstract painting at the time was still a fledgling movement in American art, where Thomas Hart Benton’s masculine, anti-European realism reigned supreme.
Morris’s wealth helped underwrite the revived literary journal. Macdonald also talked of ponying up money. There was much excitement and planning. Macdonald joined the Workers’ Party and began writing a mediocre political column for the New International, mostly on the American press. More skillfully, he picked fights.
To the editor of the New Republic, he addressed a rebuttal to Malcolm Cowley, the magazine’s literary editor and a committed fellow traveler, who, in his review of a book about the Stalin trials, seemed to be giving the benefit of every doubt to Stalin, even after what Macdonald called “the most baffling state trial in history.”
“Mr. Cowley,” wrote Macdonald, “began his article by confessing, with disarming candor, a personal prejudice against Trotsky. Perhaps it is not too late to try to match his honesty by confessing, on my part, an equally deep-seated prejudice in Trotsky’s favor. It’s hardly necessary to give my reasons. They are about the same as Mr. Cowley’s.”8 Take that.
Trotsky was an almost papal figure among the anti-Stalinists, every bit the revolutionary but also an intellectual and the exiled scapegoat of Stalin’s murderous purging. As communists in the West made common cause with liberals of all stripes—including many they had formerly denounced—the Trotskyites became an embittered minority. Sidney Hook, a philosophy professor at the City College of New York who had turned against the Communist Party some years earlier, organized a committee, headed by the celebrated American philosopher John Dewey, to consider the case against Trotsky.
Next Macdonald was taking it to the Nation, for skipping a Trotsky Commission meeting; for playing nice with New Deal Democrats; and for avoiding the question of whether Stalinism was building socialism or destroying it. Shrewdly, Macdonald realized the left’s vulnerabilities on the matter of Stalin’s brutality, but with extravagant outspokenness he used his own personal experience, his own life story, as warm-up for his attacks.
“While I was at Fortune,” he wrote to the Nation, “the Nation was always to me the great symbol of honest, truthful, intelligent journalism—everything that I missed at Fortune. But it now appears that the Nation, too, has its commitments, its investments, so to speak, just like Fortune.”9
All the world was a magazine, and working for Luce had made him a man of the world. It didn’t occur to Macdonald, for starters, to question whether a magazine résumé could double as a compass for locating the right and the good in politics. Or that it was simply naïve to believe any magazine was without prior commitments. And yet in some ways his guilelessness served him well, as a writer. The revelation of dark truths is made all the more shocking if you can play innocent first.
Henry Seidel Canby had noted in the early 1920s the growing numbers of communists in New York’s literary hangouts. Red-baiting, which most people associate with the 1940s and ’50s, is dated 1928 in the Merriam-Webster files. Fascism is noticed entering the English lexicon in 1921, Stalinism in 1927, and Nazism in 1934—words and ideas that were, of course, needed to recognize the political tumult enveloping Europe.
The thought that the United States would go the way of militarized dictatorship, amid economic problems at home and another major war brewing in Europe, struck many on the left as plausible. Sinclair Lewis wrote a dystopian alternative history in which a presidential election yields a fascist takeover of the United States government, led by a folksy, great-books-loving media mogul whose “Minute Men” shock troops quickly wrest control of private property and empower thugs to persecute Jews, blacks, and intellectuals nationwide. The detail about the dictator’s love of classic literature is a hilarious if unfair thrust in the direction of the Harvard Classics and other such programs in the best kind of culture.
Macdonald too imagined the United States was on the verge of a fascist transformation. It was a simple thing, he wrote, for “the old-fashioned liberal [to] shade off into the fascist apologist.”10 But the urge to centralize power was widespread. Even the Trotskyites were hierarchical and undemocratic.
After his call for greater transparency and a new voting system for party decisions went ignored, Macdonald resigned from the Workers’ Party in July 1941, complaining of “the interminable rehash of stale platitudes and catchwords with which the party leadership covers up (or rather, reveals) its political bankruptcy.”11
It was not the first time Macdonald took on the party, one versus all. While writing for the New International, he also wrote a letter to the editor of the very same Marxist sheet, calling an article by Trotsky himself “disappointing and embarrassing.”12
The feeling was, at times, mutual. Macdonald’s “intellectual vanity,” noted Hook, “suffered at the hands of his fellow professional revolutionists, who regarded him as a literary journeyman rather than as a schooled Marxist capable of coming to grips with the nature of the Soviet Union under Stalin.”13 Trotsky complained (in words that improved in their retelling) that “everyone has a right to be stupid but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege”—a line that must have wounded Macdonald but that he also laughingly circulated.
Partisan Review, meanwhile, was publishing work that would make the little-known journal legendary. Clement Greenberg, a Macdonald ally, typified the Review’s anti-Stalinism and enthusiasm for modernism. In 1939, he published a profoundly influential essay on the meaning of kitsch, which also endorsed the then-novel idea of an avant-garde that creates art for a cultural elite, in opposition to the cheaply reproduced culture of the masses. Even as the radicals at Partisan Review opposed capitalism and the inequalities it created, they were careful to tend distinctions between high and low culture.
And in the idea of an avant-garde—a word that appears in English only a few decades earlier—they found a ruling-class mentality in the important but neglected realms of taste and culture. Kitsch itself was a new concept and new word in English, broached for the first time only in the 1920s but used by Greenberg to describe a “gigantic apparition” of Hollywood movies and Tin Pan Alley music and Norman Rockwell covers on the Saturday Evening Post. Kitsch saved one from the hard work of looking at Picassos; it “predigested” art.
Greenberg, foreshadowing arguments that Macdonald would recirculate in the 1950s, blamed cheap reproduction and universal literacy. Now that everyone could read, literacy became a “minor skill” and no longer the “exclusive concomitant of refined tastes.” In the age of radio and Hollywood movies and universal literacy, kitsch was the “universal culture”—and the death of high culture.14
After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Macdonald and Greenberg wrote up ten propositions about the coming war for Partisan Review. It was an unintentional parody of intellectual style. Forthright bullet points were qualified by tendentious explanations that grew longer and longer, some sprouting their own internal arguments and thus requiring footnotes, one of which concerned an elaborate set of literary references to Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The authors sought to refocus attention on the possibility of a Marxist revolution, for only revolution would save America. “In the war or out of it, the United States faces only one future under capitalism: fascism.”15
As World War II developed, Macdonald was at odds with “the boys” at Partisan Review, Philip Rahv and William Phillips. After his and Greenberg’s ten propositions, the journal abruptly announced it would have no editorial line on the war since its own editors were not in agreement. This vote of no confidence in the article they had just published, an article written by one of their own editors, created a bitter divide in the masthead.
The poet Delmore Schwartz, a good friend, dismissed the brouhaha as further evidence that Macdonald was a “congenial sorehead.” Actually, it was deeply frustrating to Macdonald, who told Schwartz that “my political beliefs, which I take seriously, are not based on mere love of brawling and being ‘different’ but on some experience (mostly my years on Fortune), on sympathy for human beings (who are being brutalized and oppressed in every way in the social system we have), and on intellectual conviction which I’ve arrived at by a wide (and still continuing) reading in politics and economics.”
Schwartz was younger than Macdonald and the butt of some advice, which continued here. “As I told you a long time ago (a prediction that has come true), you’re ruining your career (not to speak of your moral being as a man) by trimming your sails to prevailing winds, by keeping silent on any hot, controversial issues, by excessive diplomacy and a hush-hush attitude toward all the fakery and shoddiness that’s for years been growing in our whole intellectual atmosphere.”16
Sometimes these intellectuals referred to their own circle as “the family.” Like the members of many families, they always presumed to know and understand each other so well, too well, actually, and, as with Macdonald’s friendly advice to Schwartz, were rather mean about it. But friction was routine, with cutting commentary being part of the fun and, in fact, an essential part of the intellectual training.
McCarthy was the source of much friction. When still a lover to Philip Rahv, she, an upper-class Catholic girl, and he, a Ukrainian-born Jew of little means, bickered a great deal. There was a recurring joke between them—a riff on an old Marxist debate—about the impossibility of achieving socialism in a single country when they couldn’t even achieve it in a single apartment.
McCarthy soon left the Partisan Review editor to marry the much older literary critic Edmund Wilson—“because he had a better prose style,” the comment went around. It was a typically mean thing to say, and McCarthy disputed it, saying that Wilson’s prose style was not really or always better than Rahv’s.17
And, indeed, there was much to be said for Rahv’s prose. In 1939, Rahv published a seminal essay on American literature, “Paleface and Redskin,” dividing American writers into these two camps representing the cerebral and mannered art of Henry James, among others, and the more boisterous, earthy passion of Walt Whitman, a division that in many cases pit the Anglophile against the Americanist.
Like Clement Greenberg’s essay on kitsch, which came out the same year, it boldly seized upon the broadest possible categories, provoking the reader, not with the writer’s politics or curious readings of important works, but with powerful assertions about the true nature of culture. By today’s more academic standards, Rahv’s two types of American writers seem crude, overdetermined, and (the ultimate campus put-down these days) facile. But as an impression of the literary mind at work, entertaining an interesting and historically supportable thesis, the essay is about as satisfying as any literary essay written in the twentieth century.
This was the Partisan Review crowd at their best, placing culture before politics. Frustrated, Dwight Macdonald decided to start his own journal, inverting that formula. Macdonald’s magazine, called simply Politics, would not ignore cultural issues but in fact “integrate them with—and, yes, subordinate them to—the analysis of those deeper trends of which they are an expression.”18
At Partisan Review he was replaced by Delmore Schwartz.