The Root is Man

Dachine Rainer

A REBEL IN DEFENSE OF TRADITION by Michael Wreszin Basic Books, HarperCollins, £17.99, pp. 561 Dwight Macdonald deserves a better book. Too little known in England and America, Dwight was one of the intransi- gent radicals of mid-20th-century America. We are plagued by biographies in which the perilously few greats — Dwight is one, or at least a near miss — are rubbished by their lessers. Wreszin never met Dwight, whom he feels comfortable calling 'Dwight' in that excessively chummy way; he says he saw him at anti-Vietnam war rallies (so did a quarter of a million non-biographers) and the only book of Dwight's prodigious out- put with which Wreszin was familiar was Memoir of a Revolutionist. Dwight was intensely alive. As I read, I felt as if a living man was being exhumed to be reburied as a corpse. Had Wreszin known his subject, might he have caught some of Dwight's extravagant spirit? The obstacles for Michael Wreszin must have been daunting: the author, a social democrat sort of liberal, could not be expected to have the kind of rapport with his subject who moved, over several decades, from privileged birth, a youthful establishment stint in the Luce empire, through the longer period of Marxism — a trap into which more fell with utopian than authoritarian instincts — to horror, when he discovered the nature of the Russian state (not until the Stalinist trials). Michael Wreszin cannot absorb radical- ism, its by-ways, inconsistencies, victories. tie is an academic. Dwight was a larger- than-life bohemian; an absolute democrat; brilliant, subtle, well-informed and witty Journalist; a political philosopher (by pas- sionate preoccupation rather than any remarkable originality); he was an human- ist, deeply concerned by the times into which he had been born; he worked hard at self-education, somewhat less at exemplary behaviour and with proselytising zeal, expressed himself in invigorating prose on politics, war, death camps, popular mecha- nised culture (of which as a former dedicat- ed movie buff, he was part victim) and sought with compassion and moral strength to alter the opinions and behaviour of his fellows; more than most, he was truthful, generous, funny and comparatively brave.

No matter how lost, if a cause were just, it became his. From race issues to Spanish refugees; with his then wife, Nancy, he founded Spanish Refugee Aid; he helped enormously when, with Nancy's help, I founded the Committee for the Liberation of Ezra Pound.

Dwight Macdonald was my first boss. Not long out of university, and, like Dwight, recently expelled from the Trot- skyite party, I was engaged by him for his journal, Politics, which, during its short life, '43-'49, became the most influential radical magazine in America. It started at a time when the arts and politics were in the arms of Communists and anti-Communists (Partisan Review), or professional Jews (Commentary), assorted bigots of the right and left; Dwight was innocent, as many of us were, of the fact that we'd been contaminated by CIA money when writing for magazines (in New York, London, Paris) which we assumed were indepen- dent. His rage was articulate and audible on two continents after this discovery dur- ing his guest editorship of London's Encounter.

Despite 10 years of application, '73 linear feet of Dwight Macdonald papers in the Yale Library', and although he familiarised himself with some of Dwight's work, interviewed wives, children and friends, and collected copious but uninformative footnotes (the reader must retrace sources) Michael Wreszin cannot manage the atmo- sphere of the times, its nuances.

It took Dwight a little time to get certain acts together. It was altogether too easy, in an exchange with Trotsky, for the old Bol- shevik to attack him in traditional acerbic style: 'Dwight Macdonald abuses the right to be stupid' was a wisecrack that went the rounds of New York intellectual circles. Naturally recalcitrant, Dwight couldn't find anyone's dogma acceptable. Not always quick, he was intrepid. His enthusiasm for truth moved him along, usually consistent- ly: He was capable of friendship; an art form. People turned to him in personal or political difficulty. Although he was sponta- neous, I believe he was aware that it all fit- ted into his (soon-to-become) Tolstoyan anarchist struggle towards exemplary behaviour. It was certainly compatible with his doctrine of 'The Root is Man.'

Dwight was lavish with time — amazing how much writing he did — and money; he was not rich, and Nancy's inheritance, siphoned for victims, gradually dis- appeared. In predicaments, one turned to him and he was available.

All his friends were recipients of his assorted, beneficence. Being generous towards friends is one thing; of higher moral worth was his generosity with strangers. (My references to Dwight should often be taken to include Nancy — they acted in tandem.) 'Spanish Refugee Aid' utilised all their resources together with those of everyone they could reach (Pablo Casals was President; its committee a cast list for arts and science) to rescue refugees, like Victor Serge and family from France, or those exiles who had climbed over the Pyrenees and were starving and homeless in France.

Dwight made his intellectual and cultural journey with the assistance of an impressive roster of friends and (former) colleagues, many of whom he outdistanced. His chief mentor — and closest friend, until his early death — was the Italian anarchist and Rome editor, Nicola Chiarmonte, after whom the Macdonalds' younger son, Nick, was named. Wreszin is unaware that Dwight was keen on the rich novels and plays of Ignazio Silone, in Switzerland in exile from Mussolini , with their overt anar- chist orientation. Others among Dwight's friends, several close at various stages of his life, were Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Norman Mailer, Bruno Bettel- heim, Paul Goodman (four and a half of these five were Jews). '

A lengthy section on his comparatively uninteresting childhood, youth (conven- tional middle-class, semi-cultivated WASP) and American education is exhaustively dull, and Dwight was never dull. Only when Dwight's talent becomes evident, and after he broke with an establishment career to begin the process of becoming the radical thinker, writer, demonstrator, editor who will go down in American history, is the subject valid.

However, there are other sections of longueurs in the detailed promiscuity (of the most commonplace sort for a middle-aged, middle-class person in mid- 20th-century America.) The author's inter- est is not salacious, but he reveals curiosity and even surprise, a kind of voyeurism. A recount of the sexual activities of Dwight and his wife waste the reader's time. Not only were they moderate by the standards of their milieu, but Dwight's personal life, exuberant, boyish, even tormented in a Goethe-esque fashion, was the least inter- esting thing about him. The space saved would be better used for a missing list of Dwight Macdonald's books, I believe out of print.

There is more time-wasting foolishness in discussing irrelevancies like anti- Semitism (in conjunction with Dwight Mac- donald — a pure egalitarian! alles gleich: men, women, children, the aged, black, white, yellow). In keeping with radical tradition, he was alert to oppression, and gravitated towards the underdog. That he was born into a social order that accepted anti-Semitism was of no relevance after he met a Jew. Owing to his associates in New York, he knew few Gentiles and his rapport was so profound (or his ear and eye so attuned) that' he acquired the speech pattern and the gestures (and, to some extent, the appearance) of a New York Jew. He could, and indeed did, confound people.

Once I was collecting tickets at the door on New York's 2nd Avenue for the lecture series 'The Root is Man'. Dwight had begun to speak, when a young man hurried over late, and asked me who was speaking. I pointed to Dwight Macdonald's name on the list of speakers. 'I know, I know', he whispered, 'but what's his real name?' He had assumed that he was a Jew, posing as a Scot. Dwight was entertained, and pleased. He considered himself 'an hon- orary Jew'.

Michael Wreszin, in trying to produce a likeness of his subject, is hampered by major and minor factors. No two people could be further apart: he is a liberal, Dwight Macdonald was a radical; while Wreszin would support a 'good' war, Dwight Macdonald would campaign against it, against every war, and in opposi- tion to his government. I know no one who supported World War II (even less one, like Wreszin, who does so in retrospect) who fails to have trouble with anyone who did not. Michael Wreszin's inability to understand how courageous, persistent, embattled Dwight became — and remained — in his uncompromising oppo- sition to World War H and subsequent wars, or in the revolution at Columbia Uni- versity, is understandable. Dwight was in a tiny minority, but was firm. He believed, increasingly, 'a plague on both your houses'; this is something no liberal committed to 'lesser evils' can understand. It is the most important attitude a radical may entertain, just as it is the easiest to abandon. It is glacial in its lone- liness, and requires as much character as brains.

The author would prefer Dwight to veer between what he calls 'red baiting' and sup- porting official government policy. Dwight never ceased attacking racism and class hierarchies, at the same time as Commu- nism. Never paranoid (a common Ameri- can pathology), Dwight refused to retreat, seduced by propaganda, into defence of the government.

Dwight was not exempt from error or inconsistency. He worked for equal rights for Blacks in the U.S. Army and would not see why one might be somewhat less than enthusiastic if one did not believe in Whites — or anyone — in an army. On the other hand, those were difficult years for humanists and logic was not an invariable ally.

Not wholly free of fault and error, sometimes exasperatingly so, in personal or political domains, but more often right than it is fashionable to give him credit for, Dwight was a man of principle; that he was a lovely human being with a penchant for culture, fun and games, is an added bonus. I wish the author had known him.

Dachine Rainer is at work on Reminis- cences and Opinions of Ezra Pound.