At a party given forty-odd years ago by the suddenly-famous Angus Wilson, Dwight Macdonald 'introduced himself, American-style, to Rose Macaulay, describing himself as an editor of the Partisan Review and founder of his own journal Politics: she stared at him and said, "Have you come all the way across the room to tell me that? How kind." ' 'American-style' may be a hint that in the writer's opinion Macdonald deserved this put-down, for being an Anglophile American if for nothing else. I find it hard to believe she really takes this view, but whether she does or not, the remark she reports might still provoke an English snigger: any suggestion that it was an exhibition of shockingly bad manners would be met with surprise or more probably contempt. Its interest in the present context is that it is the sort of thing somebody might say in an Angus Wilson story, but it is also the sort of thing that he himself would in principle have deplored.

LRB 8 June 1995 | PDF Download