“Has Pravda been plugging for the newly won higher standard of living? Trotsky was plotting to lower it. Are Soviet citizens justly proud of their collectivized farms? Trotsky would break them up. . . . The Five-Year Plan? Trotskyites tried to wreck it. The Stakhanovite heroes? Trotsky murdered them. . . . Trotsky even planned to liquidate the intelligentsia, beginning presumably with himself.”
Macdonald joined the masthead of Partisan Review, then being revived by Philip Rahv and William Phillips as an anti-Stalinist literary journal after being set aside by the John Reed Clubs that used to fund it. He also brought in his friend Morris, who was a painter and a leading member of the American Abstract Artists—abstract painting at the time was still a fledgling movement in American art, where Thomas Hart Benton’s masculine, anti-European realism reigned supreme.
Morris’s wealth helped underwrite the revived literary journal. Macdonald also talked of ponying up money. There was much excitement and planning. Macdonald joined the Workers’ Party and began writing a mediocre political column for the New International, mostly on the American press. More skillfully, he picked fights.
To the editor of the New Republic, he addressed a rebuttal to Malcolm Cowley, the magazine’s literary editor and a committed fellow traveler, who, in his review of a book about the Stalin trials, seemed to be giving the benefit of every doubt to Stalin, even after what Macdonald called “the most baffling state trial in history.”
“Mr. Cowley,” wrote Macdonald, “began his article by confessing, with disarming candor, a personal prejudice against Trotsky. Perhaps it is not too late to try to match his honesty by confessing, on my part, an equally deep-seated prejudice in Trotsky’s favor. It’s hardly necessary to give my reasons. They are about the same as Mr. Cowley’s.”8 Take that.
Trotsky was an almost papal figure among the anti-Stalinists, every bit the revolutionary but also an intellectual and the exiled scapegoat of Stalin’s murderous purging. As communists in the West made common cause with liberals of all stripes—including many they had formerly denounced—the Trotskyites became an embittered minority. Sidney Hook, a philosophy professor at the City College of New York who had turned against the Communist Party some years earlier, organized a committee, headed by the celebrated American philosopher John Dewey, to consider the case against Trotsky.
Next Macdonald was taking it to the Nation, for skipping a Trotsky Commission meeting; for playing nice with New Deal Democrats; and for avoiding the question of whether Stalinism was building socialism or destroying it. Shrewdly, Macdonald realized the left’s vulnerabilities on the matter of Stalin’s brutality, but with extravagant outspokenness he used his own personal experience, his own life story, as warm-up for his attacks.
“While I was at Fortune,” he wrote to the Nation, “the Nation was always to me the great symbol of honest, truthful, intelligent journalism—everything that I missed at Fortune. But it now appears that the Nation, too, has its commitments, its investments, so to speak, just like Fortune.”9
All the world was a magazine, and working for Luce had made him a man of the world. It didn’t occur to Macdonald, for starters, to question whether a magazine résumé could double as a compass for locating the right and the good in politics. Or that it was simply naïve to believe any magazine was without prior commitments. And yet in some ways his guilelessness served him well, as a writer. The revelation of dark truths is made all the more shocking if you can play innocent first.
Henry Seidel Canby had noted in the early 1920s the growing numbers of communists in New York’s literary hangouts. Red-baiting, which most people associate with the 1940s and ’50s, is dated 1928 in the Merriam-Webster files. Fascism is noticed entering the English lexicon in 1921, Stalinism in 1927, and Nazism in 1934—words and ideas that were, of course, needed to recognize the political tumult enveloping Europe.
The thought that the United States would go the way of militarized dictatorship, amid economic problems at home and another major war brewing in Europe, struck many on the left as plausible. Sinclair Lewis wrote a dystopian alternative history in which a presidential election yields a fascist takeover of the United States government, led by a folksy, great-books-loving media mogul whose “Minute Men” shock troops quickly wrest control of private property and empower thugs to persecute Jews, blacks, and intellectuals nationwide. The detail about the dictator’s love of classic literature is a hilarious if unfair thrust in the direction of the Harvard Classics and other such programs in the best kind of culture.
Macdonald too imagined the United States was on the verge of a fascist transformation. It was a simple thing, he wrote, for “the old-fashioned liberal [to] shade off into the fascist apologist.”10 But the urge to centralize power was widespread. Even the Trotskyites were hierarchical and undemocratic.
After his call for greater transparency and a new voting system for party decisions went ignored, Macdonald resigned from the Workers’ Party in July 1941, complaining of “the interminable rehash of stale platitudes and catchwords with which the party leadership covers up (or rather, reveals) its political bankruptcy.”11
It was not the first time Macdonald took on the party, one versus all. While writing for the New International, he also wrote a letter to the editor of the very same Marxist sheet, calling an article by Trotsky himself “disappointing and embarrassing.”12
The feeling was, at times, mutual. Macdonald’s “intellectual vanity,” noted Hook, “suffered at the hands of his fellow professional revolutionists, who regarded him as a literary journeyman rather than as a schooled Marxist capable of coming to grips with the nature of the Soviet Union under Stalin.”13 Trotsky complained (in words that improved in their retelling) that “everyone has a right to be stupid but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege”—a line that must have wounded Macdonald but that he also laughingly circulated.
Partisan Review, meanwhile, was publishing work that would make the little-known journal legendary. Clement Greenberg, a Macdonald ally, typified the Review’s anti-Stalinism and enthusiasm for modernism. In 1939, he published a profoundly influential essay on the meaning of kitsch, which also endorsed the then-novel idea of an avant-garde that creates art for a cultural elite, in opposition to the cheaply reproduced culture of the masses. Even as the radicals at Partisan Review opposed capitalism and the inequalities it created, they were careful to tend distinctions between high and low culture.
And in the idea of an avant-garde—a word that appears in English only a few decades earlier—they found a ruling-class mentality in the important but neglected realms of taste and culture. Kitsch itself was a new concept and new word in English, broached for the first time only in the 1920s but used by Greenberg to describe a “gigantic apparition” of Hollywood movies and Tin Pan Alley music and Norman Rockwell covers on the Saturday Evening Post. Kitsch saved one from the hard work of looking at Picassos; it “predigested” art.
Greenberg, foreshadowing arguments that Macdonald would recirculate in the 1950s, blamed cheap reproduction and universal literacy. Now that everyone could read, literacy became a “minor skill” and no longer the “exclusive concomitant of refined tastes.” In the age of radio and Hollywood movies and universal literacy, kitsch was the “universal culture”—and the death of high culture.14
After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Macdonald and Greenberg wrote up ten propositions about the coming war for Partisan Review. It was an unintentional parody of intellectual style. Forthright bullet points were qualified by tendentious explanations that grew longer and longer, some sprouting their own internal arguments and thus requiring footnotes, one of which concerned an elaborate set of literary references to Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The authors sought to refocus attention on the possibility of a Marxist revolution, for only revolution would save America. “In the war or out of it, the United States faces only one future under capitalism: fascism.”15
As World War
II developed, Macdonald was at odds with “the boys” at Partisan Review, Philip Rahv and William Phillips. After his and Greenberg’s ten propositions, the journal abruptly announced it would have no editorial line on the war since its own editors were not in agreement. This vote of no confidence in the article they had just published, an article written by one of their own editors, created a bitter divide in the masthead.
The poet Delmore Schwartz, a good friend, dismissed the brouhaha as further evidence that Macdonald was a “congenial sorehead.” Actually, it was deeply frustrating to Macdonald, who told Schwartz that “my political beliefs, which I take seriously, are not based on mere love of brawling and being ‘different’ but on some experience (mostly my years on Fortune), on sympathy for human beings (who are being brutalized and oppressed in every way in the social system we have), and on intellectual conviction which I’ve arrived at by a wide (and still continuing) reading in politics and economics.”
Schwartz was younger than Macdonald and the butt of some advice, which continued here. “As I told you a long time ago (a prediction that has come true), you’re ruining your career (not to speak of your moral being as a man) by trimming your sails to prevailing winds, by keeping silent on any hot, controversial issues, by excessive diplomacy and a hush-hush attitude toward all the fakery and shoddiness that’s for years been growing in our whole intellectual atmosphere.”16
Sometimes these intellectuals referred to their own circle as “the family.” Like the members of many families, they always presumed to know and understand each other so well, too well, actually, and, as with Macdonald’s friendly advice to Schwartz, were rather mean about it. But friction was routine, with cutting commentary being part of the fun and, in fact, an essential part of the intellectual training.
McCarthy was the source of much friction. When still a lover to Philip Rahv, she, an upper-class Catholic girl, and he, a Ukrainian-born Jew of little means, bickered a great deal. There was a recurring joke between them—a riff on an old Marxist debate—about the impossibility of achieving socialism in a single country when they couldn’t even achieve it in a single apartment.
McCarthy soon left the Partisan Review editor to marry the much older literary critic Edmund Wilson—“because he had a better prose style,” the comment went around. It was a typically mean thing to say, and McCarthy disputed it, saying that Wilson’s prose style was not really or always better than Rahv’s.17
And, indeed, there was much to be said for Rahv’s prose. In 1939, Rahv published a seminal essay on American literature, “Paleface and Redskin,” dividing American writers into these two camps representing the cerebral and mannered art of Henry James, among others, and the more boisterous, earthy passion of Walt Whitman, a division that in many cases pit the Anglophile against the Americanist.
Like Clement Greenberg’s essay on kitsch, which came out the same year, it boldly seized upon the broadest possible categories, provoking the reader, not with the writer’s politics or curious readings of important works, but with powerful assertions about the true nature of culture. By today’s more academic standards, Rahv’s two types of American writers seem crude, overdetermined, and (the ultimate campus put-down these days) facile. But as an impression of the literary mind at work, entertaining an interesting and historically supportable thesis, the essay is about as satisfying as any literary essay written in the twentieth century.
This was the Partisan Review crowd at their best, placing culture before politics. Frustrated, Dwight Macdonald decided to start his own journal, inverting that formula. Macdonald’s magazine, called simply Politics, would not ignore cultural issues but in fact “integrate them with—and, yes, subordinate them to—the analysis of those deeper trends of which they are an expression.”18
At Partisan Review he was replaced by Delmore Schwartz.
Chapter 15
In August 1936, Time magazine published an article about the research of Miller McClintock, the first person ever awarded a doctorate in traffic. With the rise of automobiles came the rise of traffic accidents. Analyzing what factors led in 1935, for instance, to 37,000 deaths and property loss equal to more than $1.5 billion was the job of McClintock and his traffic bureau, which were funded by the Automobile Manufacturers Association.1
Almost 100 percent of accidents, reported Time, were caused by 15 percent of drivers, a group the magazine described colloquially as “speed maniacs, psychopaths, drunks, or morons.” Expecting these folks to shape up and become safer drivers was unrealistic, according to McClintock and other “experts.” Instead, “the driver must be externally restrained from killing himself.”
McClintock classified accidents into four types: head-on collisions; collisions at intersections; those “generated by road shoulders, abrupt curves, faulty banking . . . trees, parked vehicles or pedestrians”; and rear-end collisions. These four he called, respectively, “medial,” “intersectional,” “marginal,” and “internal-stream.”
The solution was to build better roads. McClintock envisioned a now-familiar system for highways, with a clear division between opposing streams of traffic; three lanes in each direction, including one for passing and one for one slower driving; and finally, cloverleaf turnoffs. The aim, said McClintock, was to channel automobiles “in a sealed conduit past all conflicting eddies.”
There was something so funny about jargon and its pseudoscientific rhetoric, thought Philip Gove, who was still teaching composition at NYU, where witnessing the forced march of students through the constant writing of class papers had made him an authority on insincere prose. The article in Time with its overdressed categories and suspiciously credentialed expert moved him to mock.
“Sirs,” he wrote in a letter to the editor, “From my unpublished thesis on bicycle accidents I give the following digest. There are five principal kinds: vectorial (when two vehicles coming from different directions alter each other’s subsequent position); intervenient (sudden appearance of immovable obstacles); interplanetary (leaving the road, as when riding off a bridge or an embankment); subcutaneous (loss of concentration caused by bees, dogs, etc.); and exhibitionist (passenger on handle bars, standing on head, etc.). Consequently, build one-way, one-wheel, walled-in alleyways for one cyclist at a time: when he exits, green light flashes, and entrance gates admit cyclist No. 2, etc. Please to give me an honorary LL.D. and two columns in TIME (with cut). . . .”2
Gove was indeed working on a dissertation, but its real subject was a subgenre of English fictional narrative he called “imaginary voyages,” such as those Gulliver undertakes in Jonathan Swift’s classic. It was a bibliographic work involving little to no literary interpretation. Bright enough but not exactly an academic star in the making, Gove struck one colleague as being under the impression that his career would be advanced by the excellence of his classroom teaching, which was not only mistaken but naïve.3 Yet in the late 1930s he got smart and focused his efforts on projects that would lead to his degree and to publications.
It was important that he figure these things out. He had married Grace, the pretty young woman he had met while trying to improve the quality of correspondence at AT&T. And they had two children, Norwood and Susan.
Another area of eighteenth-century literature that interested Gove was Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. But this work, which represents a milestone in both the history of dictionaries and the history of English literature, had already been the subject of extensive scholarship, so Gove turned his eye to various subtle, underexplored aspects. One was how the serialization of Johnson’s dictionary, begun two months after its original publication as a single volume, inspired the almost simultaneous serialization of Nathan Bailey’s much older dictionary, which had been updated using Johnson’s dictionary and was now competing with it.
The second question that interested Gove was how the bank of citations Johnson relied on to write his dictionary reflected Johnson’s own mind and affected
the literary views of his dictionary. To know Johnson’s dictionary better, it would help to know more about the exact authors he had read and the exact editions he had read them in.
These were both highly technical areas of research, requiring detailed knowledge of the book business of Johnson’s time and the precise contents of Johnson’s library. The first reflected a surprising interest in competition among dictionaries (a potentially nasty business, all in all), and the second an important but only partial truth: that a dictionary comes down to the evidence collected by the lexicographer, those countless little passages copied out from countless, usually unseen, sources. While there is much to be said for it, this view tends to underrate the influence of the lexicographer, who, like any editor, must finally insist on what goes in and what stays out, whether for good intellectual reasons or practical necessity or to anticipate the desires of the marketplace or in deference to the prejudices of the age. The impetus for Gove’s project emphasized the purity of process at the expense of editorial prerogative—such as that exercised by Johnson himself and, in Gove’s own day, the Editorial Board of Merriam-Webster.
In early 1939, Gove defended his dissertation but was not ready to deposit the required seventy-five copies in the Columbia University library in order to receive his doctorate. He wished to travel to France and England to expand his painstaking catalog of all known examples of imaginary voyages between 1700 and 1800. A fellowship worth two thousand dollars came through, which Gove would use to put finishing touches on his dissertation and, while he was at it, perform research for a book he was planning on Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. Disappointed to learn that NYU had rejected his request for a sabbatical at half pay—an unpaid leave was his only option—he decided to go abroad with his family all the same.4
Philip spent the summer in London, while Grace and the children made do, lonesome, far away in Cornwall, on the southern tip of England. The family stayed in touch by letter, these messages intensely affectionate and always yearning. Grace recounts how Norwood “came in from meeting the postman at the gate with a letter and three packages. He said, ‘This is a day, isn’t it?’ Susie was proud that she had a possession to share, and she and Nod became such good fellows over their game of dominoes that when Nod left to get the milk she insisted on coming with him even though it was raining.”5
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