A Cant-free Voice
Read any Dwight Macdonald? If not you should. He’s a good one.
I take exception to all this.
But you can’t dine on clippings and the bones of old controversies, so what did his versatile output amount to after decades of pounding the typewriter? For years…Macdonald had been…frustrated, fatigued and plagued by the feeling that he had failed to climb the masthead of his talent by writing a major, original work – bringing out a real book, not just a basket of articles.
That’s a stupid opposition – a real book as opposed to a ‘basket’ of articles. As if there is some Platonic Ideal length, as if there is some magic that makes sixty thousand words on the same subject a Real Book while six ten-thousand word articles are a mere basket. Some articles are worth more than some books, and there is no magic ideal Platonic length. Ask Hazlitt, ask Orwell, ask Montaigne.
Well, at least he gets there in the end.
More of an odd-jobber and instigator, Macdonald harbored no creative cravings, courted no muse, left behind no masterpiece to keep his legacy warm at night…Yet sometimes the most important thing a critic leaves behind is a singular, wised-up, cant-free voice that is pure intelligence at play, and at its best Macdonald’s voice shoots off the page as if he were broadcasting live and cutting through the static.
Yes it does. That singular, wised-up, cant-free voice is more worth reading than a lot of full-length books I can think of, so fret not after the unwritten ‘masterpiece’.
OB, the opposition is being attributed to MacDonald’s feelings, not to the author — it is M. who has makes the “stupid” opposition. And from what I have read, that is a correct reading of how he felt. After all, there was Trilling on one side, churning out the liberal imagination, and Wilson on the other side, with several books — including the fine to the finland station — and it would make sense for MacDonald to feel like that. And actually, I think a competitive feeling is good for a writer, a sense of setting high goals.
Certainly just at the moment I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that small is beautiful. One does want to think one has developed one’s ideas fully, though.
Perhaps I will have to try reading the review again. I got a few paragraphs into it before I drifted away from Wolcott was saying, or trying to say, and began correcting his writing. And then I quite because no one was paying me for the chore.
Wolcott isn’t as bad as Frank Rich of the New York Times, but that isn’t saying much.
I know that, roger, but Wolcott expands on the opposition in his own words; in any case it’s the opposition I’m arguing with, not either Macdonald or Wolcott. Of course there were Trilling and Wilson, but so what? For one thing, both were very good essayists, perhaps better essayists than long bookists; for another thing, there are always other people, that doesn’t mean one has to do what they do; Jane Austen could have said to herself there’s Fanny Burney, writing those huge long novels, I should do that, but fortunately she didn’t. As for its making sense for Macdonald to think that, maybe, but my point is that it’s not mandatory; that the notion that a book is better than several essays is 1) banal and 2) false. It’s a bit of conventional thinking which I wanted to give a poke. Just explaining to me why the conventional thinking might make sense isn’t particularly illuminating.
“One does want to think one has developed one’s ideas fully, though.”
Definitely. But that could be done best in ten thousand words, or twenty, or thirty. I’ve read way too many books that were essentially very good essays blown up until they weren’t good any more. Some ideas require book-length for full development but others simply don’t. I think it’s part of the art and the craft and the discipline to get it right – to develop the ideas enough and then slam on the brakes.
“Wolcott isn’t as bad as Frank Rich of the New York Times, but that isn’t saying much.”
snicker. Good old Times.
OB, I guess I objected partly because I worry about the sound bite and the blog post taking over from the book. You are certainly right — there are tons of boring, hot air filled books. On the other hand — and here I’ll sound a little lunatic — I do think there is a silent narrative intelligence crisis in this country — people who have gotten so used to action movies, fantasy books and computer games that narrative itself – in which the “then” structure of human events unfolds – becomes boring or hard to understand. I’m one of those irritating people who can’t stand, loudly, some logical leap ( or two, or ten) in a movie to bring us to the inevitable happy ending, partly because I think that seeing that enough does damage to one’s narrative intelligence. It makes one either cynical or gullible about stories, it destroys the standards. I’m not against puppet shows, but I am against a perpetual diet of puppet shows, a culture in which adults don’t ever read a full novel or a book or anything longer than a People profile and are washed over, show after show, video after video, by fraudulent, childish narratives.
I know you aren’t saying that. I know the defense of small is correct for some writers. But I wouldn’t want to sacrifice Gibbon for a clever essayist.
Ah – now I see what you’re getting at, roger, and I have a tendency to sound lunatic in exactly the same way. In short, I know just what you mean.
But I have two resident bees (okay, a whole apiary), and one is that the essay is underappreciated and that the book is taken to be a kind of natural form when it’s more of an artifact of publishing and marketing.
So – I wouldn’t want to sacrifice Gibbon for a clever essayist either, but nor would I want to sacrifice a brilliant essayist for Gibbon; I want both, she said greedily.