Criticism in the mass media in recent years has become little more than an adjunct to the capitalist culture of consumption: the critic (of films, books, music, theater, or whatever) serves primarily as a consumer advocate, a guide to the bewildering variety of consumer choices. And Beavis and Butt-head are not the only ones to have reduced criticism to simple binary oppositions–cool stuff and stuff that sucks. Our two most influential critics, Siskel and Ebert, years ago reduced their own criticism to the positioning of their thumbs. People magazine crams its reviews into a section called simply “Picks and Pans.” The creators of the animated show The Critic (recently but briefly seen on ABC) didn’t even equip their central character, a movie critic named Jay Sherman, with complex reactions: he simply lashed out at a film he didn’t like with the cry “It stinks!”
Not that Macdonald was inevitably right. He often spouted off on subjects about which he knew little, and fell victim to frequent and sometimes embarrassing lapses of judgment. “On occasion Dwight played the holy fool,” Wreszin writes, “appearing at best unreasonably naive and at worst ridiculous. Dwight was the first to recognize his mistakes, his absurd judgments, and he took pleasure in exposing them in carefully documented footnotes. But despite the bad calls, Dwight Macdonald took risks, was invariably honest, embarrassingly candid, more so than many of his contemporaries. He did not calculate his career opportunities or cut corners to “make it.’ He did not sell out, and he needed the dough.”
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The writer Paul Goodman–who found himself more than once on the receiving end of Macdonald’s barbs–accused him of thinking with his typewriter. In his last collection of essays, Macdonald quoted Goodman’s remark almost with pride, noting that “every writer’s thought has to start somewhere and that’s where mine does. It’s in the actual process of composition that I discover, gradually, by trial and error, hit or miss, what I really think about the subject.”
In the British tradition Macdonald saw a style of writing “with that pleasurable spontaneity (oddly combined . . . with a most impressive expertise) which comes when the writer is not trying to educate his readers or to overawe them or to appease them or to flatter them, but is treating them as equals.” In Macdonald’s mind the amateur had a decided advantage: “What he does know (which may be rather impressive) he knows as part of his own life and of our culture in general, instead of in the narrow way the specialist knows it.”
Indeed, it was in the political arena that Macdonald’s contrarian instincts seemed the most irresponsible. He took up and abandoned positions with alarming speed; some saw this process, Macdonald once noted, “as indicating an open mind, others as evidence of levity.” The quick turnabouts often left his political allies reeling. “Dwight invariably turned against the orthodoxies of his own causes,” Wreszin writes, “usually shortly after enlisting in them.” Indeed, Macdonald took a certain perverse pleasure in tormenting his ostensible allies, holding them to a standard of ideological (or aesthetic) purity that few could attain. Though his own politics always listed leftward, Macdonald spent a good portion of his career assailing the dogmatism and sophistry of the American left.
For no matter how often he contradicted himself, how often he went off half-cocked, there was to all of his writing a profound integrity. He was allergic to kitsch, dedicated to the maintenance of a certain dignity in both culture and politics: he was often negative simply because so little in the world lived up to his standards. The key lesson one could learn from Macdonald, Norman Mailer once remarked, was the primacy of gut feelings over political purity. To other writers, Mailer concluded, “Dwight had something fabulous to teach. It was to look to the feel of the phenomenon. Describe what you see as it impinges on the sum of your passions and your intellectual attainments. . . . And then write without looking over your shoulder for the literary police. . . . If something feels bad to you, it is bad.”
