Resurrecting interviews with a not quite harmless editor

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INTERVIEWS WITH DWIGHT MACDONALD

Edited by Michael Wrezin

University Press of Mississippi, $35, 200 pages

REVIEWED BY JEFFREY HART

Born in New York City in 1906, raised in comfortable circumstance, prep school at Exeter and Yale Class of 1928 Dwight Macdonald possessed a sprightly prose style which carried him through a varied career in journalism. He served as an editor of Partisan Review (1937-1943), left to found the one-man Politics (1944-1948) with his wife's money, and after that wrote for an assortment of other magazines, including the New Yorker as their movie reviewer. He took movies very seriously as they began to be called "films."

The present volume contains 17 interviews with Macdonald, some quite short, beginning with Yale, and, near the end of the volume comes the most searching one, by Diana Trilling. Even when not with Partisan Review Macdonald was very much part of that circle, was ubiquitous around the parties, good company, and can be called a "New York Intellectual" if you wish. He thoroughly enjoyed that social enclave.

A much more serious member of the circle, the philosopher William Barrett wrote a good memoir about it entitled "The Truants," its title referring to the essential unseriousness and ephemerality of their activities. For all the show of cerebration and Trotskyist "radical politics," most of the members were truants, fleeing from point and refusing importance. To this generalization there are a few exceptions such as Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Robert Lowell, Barrett himself (Saul Bellow stayed apart), and a handful of others all of whom had particular disciplines and who made contributions that still stand up.

Macdonald liked the stance of an aristocratic bohemian and man of taste. What one remembers of him perhaps is his once famous distinction between Masscult, Midcult, and High Culture. There's no mystery about Hugh Culture: Yeats, Matisse. Masscult comes out of a juke box. But Midcult is the enemy: a spurious imitation of High Culture, like, say, Thornton Wilder's "Our Town."