Word: macdonaldization
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...DIED. MACDONALD CAREY, 81, actor; in Beverly Hills, California. The casually masculine Carey was a dependable lead in Golden Age Hollywood, where he appeared in more than 50 films, including Alfred Hitchcock's small-town nail biter Shadow of a Doubt (1943), which featured Carey as a G-man on the trail of amiable psychopath Joseph Cotten. Carey is perhaps most beloved by viewers of daytime television, where for three decades he played the perpetually understanding Dr. Tom Horton on nbc's Days of Our Lives -- and provided the show's trademark voice-over: "Like sands through the hourglass...
...lifetime of combative journalism, Dwight Macdonald wrote too much and sometimes too carelessly, left many projects half finished and was variously a Trotskyite, a socialist, a pacifist, an anarchist and an aging camp follower of the student lefties of '68. Yet despite his lack of discipline and consistency, many of his essays remain classics: consider his merciless dissection of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Reading that often tin-eared update of the beloved King James, Macdonald wrote, "is like walking through an old city that has just been given, if not a saturation bombing, a thorough going-over...
...Macdonald, who died in 1982 at age 76, has now been accorded a solid if not definitive biography. A Rebel in Defense of Tradition (BasicBooks; 590 pages; $30) by Michael Wreszin is the kind of academic "lumbering dinosaur" -- the author's modest self-appraisal -- that might have sent its subject to his typewriter harrumphing with dismay. Wreszin dutifully portrays the man and his times but too often paraphrases rather than quotes directly from a writer whose style was the essence of jaunt and spark. (In fairness, Wreszin does have the good sense to cite Macdonald's lead...
...writer Diana Trilling, who knew him well, Macdonald was the "most fiery" of the New York Intellectuals, that collection of political and literary eye gougers who hovered around the journal Partisan Review in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. As Trilling wrote in her haunting recent memoir, The Beginning of the Journey, the New York Intellectuals "were overbearing and arrogant, excessively competitive; they lacked magnanimity and often they lacked common courtesy." By now there are probably as many books about this group as there are about the assorted wits and twits of Britain's Bloomsbury circle, but they deserve the attention...
...seldom makes waves. At its zenith, though, it was home to some of America's brightest talents, from the novelist Mary McCarthy to the poet Delmore Schwartz to the critic Lionel Trilling. In its pages, tiresome Marxist posturing coexisted with the best of literary modernism; the editors, Macdonald perhaps most of all, believed that politics was of no consequence when it came to high art. Thus PR printed short stories by Kafka and poetry and essays by Anglo-Catholic royalist T.S. Eliot...