Rick Hertzberg brought my attention to this little gem of an essay by Geoffrey Wheatcroft on the life and writing career of Dwight Macdonald, a man who has inspired many of the best left-of-center writers of our day. Macdonald had a fearless streak, and his intellectual independence made finding a congenial publishing home for him sometimes awkward. If he were alive today, I’d expect him to have a blog. If you’re a writer, his story is inspiring, in its way. He died a pretty miserable death, but so do many writers. Orwell springs to mind, an austere English suicide of sorts. I enjoyed this early dig at Bill Buckley:
"Of late, Mr. Buckley has been much celebrated, what with his 80th birthday and the 50th of the National Review. As an antidote, try Macdonald on the ‘very argumentative and very ambitious’ Bill Buckley, whose book defending Joseph McCarthy was ‘written in an elegantly pedantic style, replete with nice discriminations and pedantic hair-splittings, giving the general effect of a brief by Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft on behalf of a pickpocket arrested in a subway men‚Äôs room.’ (Mr. Buckley’s first critics, by the way, included Peter Viereck, McGeorge Bundy and August Heckscher, whom Macdonald called ‘three leading spokesmen for the neoconservative tendency that has arisen among the younger intellectuals.’ Does any language maven know an earlier sighting of that potent word than 1952?)"
A good question. Any takers?
(Photo: Henry Grossman/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images).
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