A MORAL TEMPER
The Letters of Dwight Macdonald
by Dwight Macdonald & edited by Michael Wreszin
Macdonald biographer Wreszin (A Rebel in Defense of Tradition, 1994, not reviewed) presents riveting samples of the correspondence of the late critic, social commentator, and essayist.
Macdonald (1906–82) was the antithesis to the current barmy notion that people ought to be consistent. And there is no better evidence of his animated, inquiring, evolving intelligence than these letters that span 60 years. The young man who admired Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in 1926 (for the comeuppance it showed being delivered to the “cocky, insolent niggers”) was replaced by the crusty old liberal warhorse who, in 1967, wrote what was basically a fan letter to Martin Luther King. Macdonald worked for Henry Luce at Time, and at Luce’s new publication Fortune. After a stint at Partisan Review (and an extended affair with communism), he founded his own short-lived journal (Politics), and many of his most compelling (and outrageous) letters came from this period. “I can work up a moral indignation quicker than a fat tennis player can work up a sweat,” he wrote to a friend in 1929. Macdonald was a fierce critic (of books and films), and many of his letters smoke with acidic comments about books and writers. He told Mary McCarthy that he found Dos Passos “fattish and complacent” at a dinner in 1946 and called The Age of Innocence “a very good second-rate novel.” Macdonald’s professional ethics are everywhere on display (he refused, for example, to publish with Henry Regnery because of that publisher’s support for Joseph McCarthy), and his love letters are as touching as they are troubling (many are to lovers rather than his wife). Unfortunately, there is no statement of editorial principles (so we don’t know if ellipses, for example, are Macdonald’s or Wreszin’s), and for some reason Wreszin does not identify Macdonald’s place of writing, leaving us to infer it from context—often impossible to do.
A terrific collection that maps one of the last century’s most fascinating minds. (8 b&w photos and 2 illustrations, some not seen)