Partisan Review

The Fall Partisan Review has arrived, and with it Dwight MacDonald's second article on Masscult and Midcult. This is a theme dear to Mr. MacDonald's heart (as those who heard him speak in Harvard Hall last year will remember); it has the built-in advantage of immediately alienating a certain number of ineffectuals and of subtly flattering the educated majority; thus it is considered controversial. It also permits Mr. MacDonald to indulge in one of his greatest pleasures: insulting Archibald MacLeish.

Mr. MacDonald's thesis is essentially simple (particularly simple if one discards the watery historical analysis which so unnecessarily bloats his work). According to Mr. MacDonald there are three kinds of culture: 1. Lowbrow (including most movies, almost all television, Life, The Saturday Evening Post). 2. Highbrow (the paintings in art museums, most literature studied in universities, The Partisan Review). 3. Middlebrow (which, being the subject actually of his entire piece, will require a paragraph of its own).

According to Mr. MacDonald, American culture during the past half-century has been exposed to the same leveling process which has operated on other aspects of American society. A great legion of well-intentioned clods has materialized as a result. This is a legion that threatens to destroy any highbrow culture that remains in this country; for the middlebrow ruthlessly appropriates highbrow literature and cuts it to fit the well-worn grooves of his own mind. The middlebrow belongs to book clubs that describe the Iliad as "Homer's immortal masterpiece"; he thinks in terms of "truth" and "universals"; he reads The Saturday Review.

But this indeed is not all. Certain writers, some of them writers of great skill, have composed actual middlebrow works. MacDonald lists Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, John Brown's Body, The Old Man and The Sea, and, inevitably, J.B. The chief characteristic of middlebrow literature, he contends, lies in the presumptuous exploitation of certain shallow "universals."

Parts of Mr. MacDonald's article have great, even overwhelming validity, and one wonders why such a piece was not written long ago. It is, in fact, difficult to understand why anyone should be surprised or shocked by its rather obvious argument. (Actually, it's not really hard at all to understand; but one must preserve a minimum of charity.)

One might even be tempted to say that Mr. MacDonald has not gone far enough; that he has concentrated upon some of the more obvious manifestations of the great unconscious middlebrow conspiracy, and left many of the more arcane, insidious attitudes unexamined, free to work upon his imperiled contemporaries.

One explanation for this failure might be that Mr. MacDonald has not entirely extricated himself from "the agreeable ooze of the Midcult swamp." The great, vaulting middlebrow sin is inaccuracy borne of shallow generalization (itself generally the result of ignorance); and this sin Mr. MacDonald freely, even joyfully commits. His first essay was full of misty historical-sociological speculations on High Culture and Mass Culture; his second though not as abundant in middlebrow historiography is still decidedly fertile. One longish quotation will suffice: "The turning point in our culture was the Civil War, whose aftermath destroyed the New England Tradition almost as completely as the October Revolution broke the continuity of Russian culture. (Certain disturbing similarities between present-day America and Soviet Russian culture and society may be partly due to these seismic breaks, much more drastic than anything in European History, including the French Revolution.) The New England Culture was simply pushed aside by history, dwindling to provincial gentility...."

This astounding conglomeration certainly rivals in presumption any of Hemingway's biblical excesses (the excesses which MacDonald so perceptively attacks a few pages later). Perhaps some day, in some other little magazine, someone will write an article on the hidden danger of high class Midcult--an article perhaps that will examine more adequately the strange elasticity of the middlebrow mind.