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His family, though not wealthy, was reasonably well off, and he attended a series of private schools, ending up at Exeter and Yale.
Macdonald was born in 1906 on the Upper West Side. The English scholar Ian Watt once said of Macdonald that he had “the pugnacious resilience of a Donald Duck.” Watt meant it admiringly. He wrote with a lot of salt and pepper, and when he was criticized he joyfully published the criticisms.
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He published widely-in quarterlies, in journals of opinion, in general-interest magazines, like this one, and in big-circulation monthlies, like Esquire, where he served as the movie critic for six years. Macdonald began his intellectual career in the nineteen-thirties, in the center ring of the great political cockfight between the Stalinists and the Trotskyists in New York City, then, in the nineteen-forties, broke with all sects and sectarians to run his own little magazine, and finally established himself, in the nineteen-fifties, as the Lord High Executioner of middlebrow culture. He was easy to quarrel with and, by most accounts, easy to forgive. He was also, almost serenely, pure of heart. Macdonald was vociferous, opinionated, and, when he was drunk, nasty and combative, though this was true of many of his peers as well-it was an alcoholic milieu. He was therefore nicely endowed to flourish in a provincial culture-the intellectual niche world of New York City from the nineteen-thirties to the nineteen-sixties-where trading attacks and high-minded insults with former or future friends was regarded as simply one of the ways that work got done. Macdonald not only enjoyed provoking he liked to be provoked.
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Macdonald was a man who had a congenital distrust of authority, but whose talent and charm made this into an appealing trait of temperament rather than a personal or professional liability. The roots of this mentality go back to the nineteen-thirties, and one of its liveliest cultivators and exponents was the journalist Dwight Macdonald. They thought of their cultural preferences in exactly the same way that they thought of their political principles: as positions that, if everyone adopted them, would make for a better world. I wonder how many people actually can compartmentalize that way in any case, people like my dad did not.
They can be democrats out in the town square and snobs at home. One way to explain them would be to say that they subscribed to a particular liberal idea: that there is often a discrepancy between public values and private tastes, but as long as these things are kept in separate compartments people have no obligation to justify their personal likes on political grounds.
I met a lot of people like that growing up, people who managed to combine unequivocal support for principles like equal rights and freedom of speech with flagrant cultural élitism. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Metropolitan Opera were the joint deities of his world. I knew such a person very well: my father. The liberal highbrow, the person who favored an immediate ban on nuclear weapons and refused to have a television in the house, was a wonderful mid-twentieth-century type.
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Photograph by Walker Evans / Walker Evans Archive / The Metropolitan Museum of Art Macdonald around the time he joined Partisan Review, in the nineteen-thirties.
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