Big Mac

By Melvin Maddocks

DISCRIMINATIONS by DWIGHT MACDONALD 466 pages. Grossman. $15.

For going on 40 years now, Dwight Macdonald has written to--or at--his fellow Americans rather in the style of an indignant letter to the Times. The things Your Correspondent has to put up with! From native gaucheries ("Our manners are either bad or nonexistent") to Hollywood movies ("Palm trees don't make Los Angeles an exotic city and options on Ulysses don't make Hollywood a sophisticated one"). Then there's Webster's New International Dictionary (third edition), the "One Hundred Great Books," and all translations of the Bible except the King James Version. Will these insults to a Yaleman's taste (class of 1928) never cease?

People are out there in the land of Midcult, My Not-So-Dear Editor, who should be warned against Marshall McLuhan (compared to whom "Spengler is cautious and Toynbee positively pedantic"). Buckminster Fuller (whose prose reads like Archie the cockroach with his capital shift working). And of course Tom Wolfe--"Parajournalist!" --who presumed to attack The New Yorker, the Golden Arches Macdonald calls home. Could a Macdonald enemies list be complete without those sparring partners Cozzens (James Gould) and Cousins (Norman), the author of By Love Possessed who was by Macdonald savaged and the editor of Saturday Review/World? (When Macdonald called Cousins' magazine a "honeypot of banality and deep-stuff' for openers, then went ad hominem, his wife told him he "shouldn't attack Cousins personally.'' It's a wise wife who knows her husband.)

Macdonald explains to her and to the reader: "I've always specialized in negative criticism--literary, political, cinematic, cultural--because I've found so few contemporary products about which I could be 'constructive' without hating myself in the morning." If Macdonald is disappointed by American culture, he is "appalled" by American politics. His "time-tested anarchist principles" have made him almost as hard on fellow leftists as on Goldwater Republicans, and perhaps hardest of all on liberals. Drawing from the back files of Politics, the superb little magazine he edited and published (and often practically wrote) between 1944 and 1949, he offers the definitive gloomy word on Wendell Willkie and Henry Wallace --targets that may not exactly fascinate a post-Watergate reader. But what a delight to watch the Master at work!

As a writer, Macdonald has the soul of a middle linebacker. Crunch! goes the hit, opinion foremost like an elbow to the head. But the art of Macdonald lies in the way he wraps up a victim after he has wobbled him. (1), (2), (3), (a), (b), (c)--he smothers his foe with Q.E.D. exercises in logic and item upon item of proof. As he closes in for the kill, Macdonald may mimic the cries of the wounded. He offers spot-on parodies of Norman Mailer, Wolfe and circa 1938 TIME--"celebrated last month by potent Newsmagazine TIME, its fifteenth birthday." If the subject is still twitching, he finishes him off with a footnote.*

What do Macdonald's windmills have in common as the tiller sees them? Humbug. Cant. The special form of dishonesty that betrays itself as lack of style. Irving Howe once complained that if Jesus were to deliver the Sermon on the Mount tomorrow, "Dwight Macdonald would write that while 'Mr. Christ makes some telling points' they suffer from syntactical confusion and 'a woolly, pretentious style.' " Macdonald's answer: "Were the Sermon woolly," that would be "my reaction, and I should be right, since in that case the Sermon would not be the great moral message it is but a botch, and not only in style."

What makes Macdonald original, perhaps irreplaceable as a pan-critic (in both senses of "pan") is in fact a latent romanticism. More than his victims can appreciate, he is a genial curmudgeon, teetering on the very edge of hope. He growls partly to keep from being played for a sucker. Macdonald might even be called an American Bernard Shaw, if Shaw had written only prefaces or if Macdonald had written plays. Besides, that is to say, these marvelous little one-act monologues, featuring the persona he made of himself. .Melvin Maddocks

*174 footnotes in 466 pages, to be specific.

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