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Dwight MacDonald, Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (Random House, 1963) Late in his life Dwight MacDonald summed up his intellectual career in a single sentence. "When I say no, I'm always right," he said, "and when I say yes, I'm almost always wrong." As a cultural and political critic he was the penultimate antagonist, a surly Menckenian boozer who drifted towards the radical left (he considered World War II little more than a battle between capitalist imperialist powers), but who worshipped the god of polemics more so than any single ideology (when Delmore Schwatrz wrote a letter in his defense, he wrote back and said, "In the future, either keep silent or join the enemy.") Against the American Grain, a collection of MacDonald's magazine writing, displays the debunker in full form, attacking, in the words of Melvin Maddocks, "the soft, the incompetent, and the dishonest aspects of American culture." He attacks substandard versions of the Bible and Webster's New International Dictionary, war propagandists, linguists who cannot distinguish between the words "disinterested" and "uninterested," the degradation of literary taste as exhibited through the voice of artistic affectation, on, and on, lamenting above all a kind of intellectual fall from grace in American life, where the middlebrow has replaced the highbrow, where the highbrow has fallen completely off the map. Maddocks writes in the New York Times Book Review, "All too many Americans play the culture game as a kind of one-upmanship where the thing to do is to pick up the official signals and never get caught away from the "O.K." names. Mr. MacDonald's role is to shout above the bland agreeable chorus: 'The emperor has no clothes.'" (April 21, 1963) MORE: Essay on MacDonald in the online version of the New Criterion Sample of the backlash over MacDonald’s criticism of Tom Wolfe, in the New York Review of Books |
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