The Dwight Supremacy
Germany’s secret weapon. After years spent in exile in Switzerland, Lenin (second from right) at last returned to his homeland to take charge of the revolution. Illustration byJohn Keay
Up From Literalism, or The Swiss Red Army Knife
Not merely in your capacity as reader of subscription-canceling letters to the editor, or of +99% of blog-comment threads, but as an observer of humans at their most literal-minded, most unwittily-comic best, you will have smiled over that breed among us innocent of all grasp of the drily ironic - as, e.g., seen this week in a comment beneath an item at the "State of the Union" blog* at The American Conservative from its publisher Ron Unz:
Finally, a landslide 68% majority of Swiss voters yesterday passed a public referendum imposing some of the world’s most severe restrictions on all executive compensation. This is hardly surprising given that Switzerland has the strongest ultra-leftwing tradition in Europe and throughout the twentieth century served as the world center of International Communism.
Thomas Sm says:Switzerland is one of the most right-wing countries in Europe, so I cannot understand the last comment. The fact that Lenin hid out there is not really relevant. After all, the Germans snuck him back into Russia and wanted him to gain power (if briefly) – is that because the Kaiser was a Commie?Political power in Switzerland is mostly shared between patriotic right-wingers, free-marketeers, and Christian Democrats.
American Mercury's Right-Winged Heels
*Named after "State of the Union", the column by Albert Jay Nock, 1936-1939, in The American Mercury under Paul Palmer, a former Baltimore Sun colleague of H.L. Mencken who restyled the monthly to Reader's Digest size; the magazine's entry at Wikipedia highlights its long post-Mencken involvement with, e.g., J. Edgar Hoover, Billy Graham, Eastern Bloc skulduggery, the launch of Meet the Press, the heirs to the Thompson Submachine Gun Company, and, before long, divers "free"-market apparatchiks all het up over Teh Jooz an' Teh Blaxxx, e.g.:
A 1978 article praised Adolf Hitler as the "greatest Spenglerian."[citation needed] ... the spring 1980 issue celebrated Mencken's centennial, and lamented the passage of his era, "before the virus of social, racial, and sexual equality" grew in "fertile soil in the minds of most Americans." The last issue concluded with a plea for contributions to build a computer index — with information about the 15,000 most dangerous political activists, actual or alleged, in the United States.[citation needed]
Revival
In 2010:The publishers refer to themselves as the "Jefferson-Mencken Group."[4] **The new American Mercury was created in 2010 by a group of volunteer writers and editors, among whom are some who collectively worked with the contributors and management of the print Mercury for over 40 years.[3]
**For whose PBS/syndicated TV version of the same name I for unum among the pluribus cannot wait: [cue horn-blasting cadenza] "From the nation's capital in punishment of sound minds ev'ruh-wayah ... The Jefferson-Mencken Group: an unscripted, unrehearsed, unhinged, unsober, no bars watering-holed skull-bust with the week's events and the weak savants who address them ... your host, Jefferson Mencken: [in powdered, pig-tailed white Whig, clenching cigar, smirkingly, between upper and lower sets of wooden teeth] ISSUE NUMBAH ONE - WE KNOW YOU'RE A NAZI, MR. PRESIDENT, BUT WHAT, WE SAY, WHAT, BOY, ARE WE?" ... And now a word from our spawn, Sir, the shufflin' faithful family cooks at What-Boy-Are-We ...
Dwight Macdonald and friends at Mary McCarthy's 57th St. apt in the 1940s; Macdonald is at lower left, on his right the actor Kevin McCarthy (of Invasion of the Body Snatchers fame, brother of Mary); top row, l to r, Miriam Chiaromonte, Nicola Chiaromonte, Mary McCarthy, John Berryman
The Dwight NYT Zone
From Dwight Macdonald, "The Times--One Man's Poison: What an aroused critic would do if he were editor," in The Reporter for February 14, 1950:
The Times is not edited. It just happens once a day.... The trouble with Pravda as a news-reporting instrument is that it conceals practically all the news by omission. The Times, which prints five times as much news, keeps the facts from the public by sheer largesse. This is the Purloined Letter principle in journalism: Tell the reader so much that he will overlook the real point....Next the Times should do something about its front page.
To begin with, two minor points:
The headlines are printed in a type that lacks both force and refinement, that is hard to read, and that gives the front page a gray, washed-out look. It has been used at the Times for about forty years, and it would probably be no more difficult to persuade the editors to change it than to get the Pope to revise the mass.
Stoker at YaleWilliam F. Buckley Jr. in 1951 with his book that shocked the academic establishment.
From Dwight Macdonald (Yale '28), "God and Buckley at Yale", in The Reporter for May 27, 1952:
The Bundy RebuttalInterestingly enough, three leading spokesmen for the neo-conservative tendency that has arisen among the younger intellectuals were hostile to Buckley (who, strictly speaking, is a reactionary rather than a conservative) : August Heckscher (Yale '36) in the New York Herald Tribune, Peter Viereck in the New York Times, and McGeorge Bundy ('40) in the Atlantic. This last was the lengthiest and most apoplectic denunciation that appeared. It was followed by a toe-to-toe slugging bout, in the "Dear sir, you cur" tradition, with Mr. Bundy snorting "fraud," "dishonesty," "this twisted and ignorant young man," and Mr. Buckley deploring "Mr. Bundy's intemperate performance . . . the dress of his frantic and unreasoning apologia ... his appalling insincerity." Technically, it was a draw: Though Bundy seemed to have the weight of the argument on his side, his cumbersome style, reminiscent of the late Gunboat Smith, showed off poorly against Kid Buckley's fast footwork. The Gunboat also hit several blows below the belt, as in citing the false rumor about Buckley, Sr., sending copies to the alumni, and in charging Buckley, Jr., with chicanery in not stating in the book that he is a Catholic....Campus Savonarola... Despite all [the] advance warning, Bill's book seems to have caught the Yale authorities flatfooted. They have reacted with all the grace and agility of an elephant cornered by a mouse. Instead of meeting the serious issues raised, they have fatally wavered between testy abuse and a lofty pretense that the book doesn't exist (while defending Yale against its charges)....Precocious Old Age... The year after his graduation he also spent at Yale, teaching Spanish and working on his delayed-action bomb. Most of last fall he spent in Mexico trying to start an export-import business ; the success of his book led him to abandon business for a career as a publicist. Several right-wing journals offered him jobs: he chose the American Mercury, of which he is now an editor, because it had the biggest circulation.It was a characteristic choice: Bill Buckley combines opportunism and conviction in a sometimes bewildering way. He has the outward and visible signs of the campus radical, and the inward and spiritual qualities of the radical's wealthy grandfather. Earnest-eyed, grim-lipped, lanky and ascetic, he is passionate about first principles, articulate to an almost frightening degree, and would obviously rather argue than eat. He has the narrow, logical bigotry of youth (wherever did the notion originate that the young are more open-minded than the middle-aged?). "It stands to reason, if the word doesn't offend you . . ." he began a recent letter. He never went through a leftist phase, though he admits he wrote "some stupid things" in the News; in 1948, he even defended academic freedom ("before I'd really thought it through").......Something happened to swivel round the guns of this rationalistic fortress to bear on liberal positions. What? We can only speculate ... Perhaps it is simply that Bill Buckley is very argumentative and very ambitious. Since the New Deal there has arisen in academic and intellectual circles, where the best arguments take place, a new liberal orthodoxy, what Peter Viereck calls "the Babbittry of the Left," while of late years a countertendency, a reaction against liberalism, has gone far in the country as a whole. The line Buckley has taken permits him to enjoy the pleasures both of unorthodox rebellion (within Yale) and of conformity (outside Yale). Had he written defendingacademic freedom, for instance, the liberals would have agreed—and yawned—and the antiliberals would have disagreed—and not bought his book.This may seem a cynical explanation, but Bill Buckley is a realistic young man. A year ago he published an article in the Freeman that argued that "we must support McCarthy" despite his "manners" because his demagogic methods are the only effective ones in a mass democracy in which the "non-university crowd," ignorant and easily bamboozled, is dominant. The Senator's use of the Big Lie was justified because (a) Roosevelt and Truman lied too, and (b) it has been effective.Presumably in line with this last thought, Buckley recently appeared on "The Author Meets the Critics" supporting the authors of U.S.A. Confidential in a stormy debate with James Wechsler, editor of the New York Post, and Virgilia Peterson. When a friend asked him how he could identify himself with that sort of gutter journalism, he replied: "I don't like the way the book is written any more than you do. But it's on our side. . . . And anyway,you've got to write that way to reach a big public."Young Mr. Buckley is getting into low company. But so did the youthful ideologues of the 1930's—the Communists and the Daily Worker being about on the same moral and intellectual level as McCarthy and U.S.A.-Confidential. It is to be hoped that, as he grows up, he will become at once less fanatical and less "practical."
Monsters' Ink
From Dwight Macdonald, "Charles Addams, His Family, And His Fiends", in The Reporter for July 21, 1953:
SHORTLY before the United States entered the Second World War, Dr. Paul Josef Goebbels's Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung reprinted a cartoon from the New Yorker by Charles Addams that showed a Boy Scout discovering his father about to hang himself and shouting, "Hey, Pop, that's not a hangman's knot!" "Jokes of this sort," observed the Nazi editors with obvious distaste, "often appear in magazines which are convinced of their mission in the American Century." And more recently, a newspaper in eastern Europe reprinted a page of Addams cartoons as documentary evidence of the "cannibalistic decadence" of western capitalism.
...Living in domestic affection in their cobwebby Victorian haunted house, the gruesome Family happily watch the installation of a picture window with a superb view of a cemetery, put a sign on their gatepost: BEWARE OF THE THING, send over to the neighbors to borrow a cup of cyanide, and entertain the kiddies at bedtime with shadow pictures of a vampire bat. The Bad Boy makes a guillotine from his Erector set, pushes a toy school bus onto the tracks in front of his speeding toy train, and, accompanied by his sister, crouches behind a sign that reads WARNING, CHILDREN AT PLAY, with a huge boulder poised to roll in front of an oncoming car. The Moral Monster, seeing a truck approaching on a narrow bend of a mountain road, helpfully signals the car behind him to pass; sitting on a bench in the park, he feeds limp gobbets of flesh to a flock of vultures with the same gentle enjoyment as the gentleman on the next bench no doubt derives from feeding crumbs to the pigeons; surrounded by a weeping audience at a movie, he alone giggles delightedly. Fair is foul and foul is fair as Addams's people hover through the fog and filthy air....
Nancy CramptonCharles Addams, displaying his legendary sense of humor, in a 1975 portrait. (NPR.org, 2006)
Addams is hardly conventional by Park Avenue or even New Yorker standards. "He is a polite man, but not a conformist," [his friend the artist Saul] Steinberg has said, and there is a connection between his own tastes and his cartoons. A full suit of armor stands in the living room of his apartment. Fifteen crossbows line the walls; he picks them up in antique shops at two hundred to four hundred dollars apiece and believes that he has the biggest private collection—eighteen in all—in the country. His house at Westhampton, while it in no way resembles the haunted houses of the cartoons, does have a living room, formerly used to house carriages, that is forty-five feet long and three stories high with clerestory windows and a large executioner's ax over the fireplace, the whole giving the effect of a medieval wassail hall. His home furnishings have included a miniature guillotine, a stuffed bear, a colored papier-mache anatomical model of a man whose skin has been removed for greater visibility, and a child's tombstone he picked up from a monument maker. ("It's all right," he explains to his guests. "It wasn't attached to anybody.")Addams's interest in Addams-like houses is personal as well as professional. He seeks them out on trips, collects photographs of them, and has given much thought to the subject. He finds a gloomily fantastic exuberance in Victorian architecture. "But the most sinister place of all," he once remarked, "is a modernistic house that is going to pieces. It has a strange mausoleum quality, especially in the moonlight, all that blank dead-white cement with cracks running across it, those rusted iron pipes and huge glittering dead windows." He is also fond of visiting insane asylums and snake farms. As noted above, it won't do to exaggerate the distance between Addams and his work....The first cartoon that is immediately recognizable as an Addams appeared in April, 1935: A museum night watchman finds two bottles of milk and the morning paper outside the door of an Egyptian tomb. By 1936, Addams was concentrating almost exclusively on ghosts, witches, mediums, cannibals, freaks, monsters, vultures, suicides, and murderers.The Addams Family began to materialize in 1938: A dapper vacuum-cleaner salesman is making his pitch in the cobwebby Addams House to the Young Witch and the Sinister Butler, while a furtive creature with a pointed nose, who may be called Cousin Willie, peers down through the moldering banisters. The second Family cartoon did not appear for more than a year. Again, it was just the Witch, the Butler, and Cousin Willie, but this one established the canon: The first Butler was a bearded pirate, but now the Butler arrives, a square-headed, misshapen monster out of Boris Karloff by Frankenstein; the Witch has achieved a decent degree of emaciation, and her hair, sleekly coiffed in the first drawing, is now properly dank.In 1941 the Leering Grandmother made her debut, and in the fall of 1942 Addams gave the Witch a husband or at least a paramour (he says he can't bear to think of them as married) : a wide-headed, gap-toothed, pug-nosed degenerate who is shown dreaming by the cold family fireside with his arm affectionately around the Witch. "Are you unhappy, darling?" he asks. "Oh yes, yes! Completely," she replies with a wan smile. It was not until 1944 that the Family circle was completed, with the Bad Boy and the Morbid Little Girl—though the Boy, in various preliminary guises that finally evolved into the brutal, stocky, bristle-haired little fiend with which we are familiar, had been appearing by himself for several years. In 1947, we got a glimpse of Uncle Eimar, or rather of his hand grasping the heavily barred peephole of a door in the attic: "We've had part of this floor finished off for Uncle Eimar," the Witch explains to a visitor.The last major Addams character to make his entrance (in 1944) was the flabby, fungoid Moral Monster. A solitary bachelor of furtively unspeakable habits, he appears only by himself, apparently being too depraved for family life, even in the Addams sense....ALTHOUGH most of Addams's copious mail consists of suggestions for cartoons, his fans wanting to take part in his work as well as admire it, they are rarely helpful, usually because in their enthusiasm the writers have trespassed beyond the humorous into the just plain gruesome: "Show a 'hung' jury" .. . "A child in a toy store holding a machine gun and all the employees are dead" . . . "Have your bad boy fill his water pistol with sulphuric acid" .. . "a subway door filed to a shining knife-edge; the conductor, of course, would be the bloated, leering fellow you draw so often." Some ideas are sent in again and again: bath towels marked "His," "Hers," and "Its"; apes or ghosts making a product labeled "Untouched by Human Hands"; a hearse going through a parkway tollgate with a shrouded arm reaching out to pay the dime. Sometimes Addams himself goes over the line, at least in his editors' opinion. One rough rejected as too rough—it was actually drawn by a colleague as a burlesque—showed a father receiving his baby from a hospital nurse with the remark, "Don't wrap it, I'll eat it here."
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