A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald

by Michael Wreszin (Introduction)

Dwight Macdonald's biographer has brought together in one volume a comprehensive selection of letters from the correspondence of one of the most astute observers of American politics, society, and culture in the twentieth century. Macdonald's letters span his lifetime, from his education at Exeter and Yale in the twenties through his career as an editor of Partisan Review, founder of Politics magazine, staff writer for the New Yorker, columnist for Esquire, and cultural critic and essayist for other major publications. The scope of his interests was extraordinary as was the diversity of friends and colleagues who became his correspondents. He had an instinctive grasp of the important fact and important thought, and an uncanny ability to bring an issue before the intellectual community, of which he was a prominent member. Macdonald consistently had his eye on what he felt was a change in the moral temper of the times and a prevailing dehumanization of the individual. Few spoke more eloquently against the mechanized terror of the modern world and of the separation of means from ends. His letters, always spirited and engrossing, trace the life of an upper-middle-class white male, schooled in the elite institutions of the WASP establishment, who managed to jettison the prejudices and provincialism of his class and, through the force of an inquiring mind, become a penetrating critic of mid-century American civilization.

512 pages, Hardcover

First published October 25, 2001

Reviews

[Alex Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had greatly enjoyed Dwight Macdonald's essays; his formidable intellect and witty, incisive use of language never failed to impress. However, this collection of his letters was somewhat off-putting. Macdonald's enormous ego (which is often bad-tempered in his younger days) is unappealing in large doses. This is especially true in the first half of the book, when Macdonald tends not to be content with being big himself; someone else has to be small. Either Macdonald did not use letters to exchange information about his personal life or the editor has eliminated all such correspondence, since there is virtually no reference to Macdonald's family, vacations, leisure pastimes, etc. in the volume. The material reproduced here is exclusively geared toward professional life and/or political and literary matters until the middle of the book, when there are a handful of letters about private emotions from Macdonald to his mistress. About 3/4ths of the way through the volume the editor has included a few letters from Macdonald to his sons, but even these tend to be on general subjects or to deal with career or academic advice. Michael Wreszin has done a startlingly weak job of editing. Many of the people referred to in the correspondence are unidentified, repeatedly Wreszin fails to give any background to incidents referred to in the material, and Wreszin has given no information about where the letters are being written. This book suffers badly in comparison with, for example, the brilliant editing job which Peter Sussman did on Jessica Mitford's letters. In addition, this book has the most sloppy indexing I can remember in any nonfiction work - - people referred to in the letters repeatedly have no listing in the index.