Dwight Macdonald
• Richard Evans Lee
Dwight Macdonald has been a hero of mine for many years.
An intellectual journalist equally at leisure in the jaunty pages of Esquire (where he reviewed films) and the ascetic quarters of Partisan Review, Macdonald — born 100 years ago last month — was a generalist whose specialty was capsizing conventional wisdom, exposing highfalutin fraudulence and filing heretical dissents. His essays on mainstream American culture ("Masscult and Midcult") and the barbarisms of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible were literary events; his lambasting of James Gould Cozzens's novel "By Love Possessed" was comparable to Mark Twain's defenestration of James Fenimore Cooper; his tenure as founding editor of Politics, a small radical publication started in 1944 after he broke with Partisan Review over the war (he opposed America's entry), yielded major work by Simone Weil, Albert Camus and Bruno Bettelheim; his impious critiques of biblical epics — later collected in "On Movies" — were cheerfully absurdist (from his review of "The Greatest Story Ever Told": "There was also that 'Woman of No Name' who pushes through the crowd as Jesus is healing the sick and, after he has grappled with her, cries out in purest Bronx, 'Oi'm cured! Oi'm cured!' and turns around to run toward the camera with arms waving in triumph — and damned if it isn't Shelley Winters"); his championing review of Michael Harrington's "Other America" in 1963 helped ignite the antipoverty movement.