Novelist Norman Mailer called Dwight Macdonald "one of the best teachers of writing in the world."
Over his 50-year career, Macdonald wrote several books, edited the Partisan Review and other journals, served as a staff writer on The New Yorker, and contributed movie reviews to Esquire magazine and The Today Show. In his final years he occasionally accepted invitations to lecture at universities. But he never considered himself a teacher.
Macdonald "gave no classes," Mailer said, but "if one had learned a little about writing already, there were so many avenues to follow in the felicities of his style."
Here's how Mailer summarized the lessons he'd drawn from Macdonald's prose:
Bring to the act of writing all of your craft, care, devotion, lack of humbug, and honesty of sentiment. And then write without looking over your shoulder for the literary police. Write as if your life depended on saying what you felt as clearly as you could, while never losing sight of the phenomenon to be described. If something feels bad to you, it is bad.Macdonald himself credited an editor at Fortune magazine for teaching him "the great basic principle of organization: put everything on the same subject in the same place."
(The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing. Random House, 2003)
I remember when an editor, Ralph Ingersoll I think, casually explained this trick of the trade to me, that my first reaction was "obviously," my second "but why didn't it ever occur to me?" and my third that it was one of those profound banalities "everybody knows"--after they've been told.That's often how it goes. The best writing advice is obvious--after we've been told.
(Review of Luce and His Empire, in Discriminations: Essays and Afterthoughts, 1938-1974, by Dwight Macdonald. Viking Press, 1974)
More "Profound Banalities" About Writing:
Image: Discriminations: Essays and Afterthoughts, 1938-1974, by Dwight Macdonald. Viking Press, 1974
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