Citizen Dwight Richard H. King (bio) Michael Wreszin. A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald. New York: Basic Books, 1994. xviii 590 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $30.00. Intellectual biographies — or biographies of intellectuals, writers, thinkers — have a problematic status. Because philosophers and theorists tend to adopt a god’s eye view in their work, biographers tend to bring them down to earth, revealing the unsuspected frailties or sometimes the surprising humanity. With an “intellectual journalist” such as Dwight Macdonald, a prime example of Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism,” it is somewhat different. Macdonald was always “there” in his work — chortling, huffing and puffing, castigating — and thus biographer Michael Wreszin must compete with Macdonald himself to see who can be wittiest or most insightful or even most critical about Macdonald. Because his interests ranged so widely and he was active over more than four decades, there are many Dwight Macdonalds. New Left figures such Noam Chomsky and Staughton Lynd were profoundly shaped by his Politics magazine (1944–1949), where Macdonald and other, mainly European intellectuals developed many of the positions later associated with the New Left. First encountered as a self-styled cultural aristocrat, a defender of high culture against “masscult” and “midcult” in the 1950s, the generation of the 1960s best remembers Macdonald as a presence at antiwar marches and student protests and for his long review-essay of Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962), which forced the Kennedy administration to confront the existence of poverty in the affluent society. Others may have read Macdonald’s acerbic and brilliant film criticism in Esquire between 1960 and 1966, an effort that made film-watching seem like an activity worthy of a mature mind. But after the early 1970s, Macdonald fell silent, plagued by writer’s block, depression, and declining health, helped along by excessive drinking. Overall, listing Macdonald’s activities as a public intellectual conveys, as Michael Wreszin puts it in his generally excellent biography of Macdonald, the split between “the agitating activist” and the “incisive cultural critic” (p. 457). [End Page 118] Nor was that the only split in Macdonald’s long and contentious life. At various times, Macdonald was a Marxist and Trotskyist, a cultural conservative and a radical anarchist, a pacifist and a communitarian and, by the 1960s, a kind of radical liberal, even though he had spent much of his life lambasting American liberals as weak-kneed and spineless. Although always a stout anti-Stalinist, Macdonald was a zealous defender of civil liberties even for those whom he considered soft-headed. If there was any other constant target of Macdonald’s animus besides Soviet sympathizers and the “lib-labs,” it was academics. And yet one of Wreszin’s best chapters, entitled “Dwight’s Last Tapes,” movingly describes Macdonald thriving as a teacher of film and literature at John Jay College in New York in the early 1970s. Macdonald was a conscientious teacher who, though still something of a cultural elitist, was devoted to his students and “treated everyone as an equal” (p. 472), down to and including secretaries and projectionists. One might wonder where Macdonald’s friends were through these last difficult years when he sometimes drew unemployment and welfare checks. Part of the problem was that several of them, such as his best friend and confidant Nicola Chiaromonte, along with others such as Hannah Arendt and Paul Goodman, were dead, while other New York intellectuals, having grown neoconservative, had ditched Macdonald as politically irresponsible after his public support for rebellious students and antiwar causes in the 1960s. Indeed, one “lesson” to be drawn from Wreszin’s portrait of Macdonald is the extent to which the 1960s, as seen through a figure such as Macdonald, were a terminus rather than a point of departure for a whole generation of intellectuals and a whole set of political and cultural issues. Wreszin is at his best when writing about Macdonald the man. Macdonald was nothing if not gregarious with a particular talent for lively intellectual exchange and a “marvelous ability to be inclusive, to draw people out, and to make them feel what they were saying was important...
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