Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [148]
The objection to middlebrow, or petty-bourgeois, culture is that it vitiates serious art and thought by reducing it to a democratic-philistine pabulum, dull and tasteless because it is manufactured for a hypothetical “common man” who is assumed (I think wrongly) to be even dumber than the entrepreneurs who condescendingly “give the public what it wants.” Compromise is the essence of midcult, and compromise is fatal to excellence in such matters.
In my own by now rather extensive time, the textbook example of middlebrow cultural journalism has been the Saturday Review, a successful (circulation-wise) amalgam of de jure high seriousness and de facto low accommodation. (Recently, by entrepreneurial fission, it has become four magazines, a solemn thought indeed.) The Saturday Review began shakily in the twenties under the genteel-academic aegis of Henry Seidel Canby, and it was firmly taken in hand some thirty years ago by a nonacademic, but also genteel, midcult entrepreneur named Norman Cousins, who hyped the circulation from 15,000 to over 600,000. I didn’t think much of it under Professor Canby (whose course in “creative writing” I didn’t think much of either, in 1927 at Yale; sorry, must be a congenital allergy) and Mr. Cousins’s jazzed-up S.R. didn’t seem any better or any worse; just mediocre in a different way.[2] The Saturday Review used to proudly add of Literature until Mr. Cousins had accreted so many unliterary but popular departments—travel, pop science, records, movies, consumerism, etc.—that even he was embarrassed and dropped the last two words.
The end of the old Saturday Review came in the spring of 1971 when it was sold to John Veronis and Nicolas Charney, two younger midcult entrepreneurs, and Norman Cousins went with it. The agreement was that he and his old staff were to continue to edit the magazine, which they did for six months. Then, in the November 27 issue, Cousins announced their exit in a long and cloudy “Final Report to the Readers,” never making clear just what caused him to change his mind.
“We have seldom known a more compatible partnership....John and Nick...went out of their way to express appreciation of ‘S.R.’s’ staff members. It isn’t difficult to develop strong bonds of affection for such men. Our personal and working relationships have been satisfying rather than merely satisfactory. Despite this, I feel I cannot continue as editor. Nick and John have strong ideas about the future of the Saturday Review. This is as it should be.” The Nixon touch; but the only thing he made perfectly clear was that “Nick” and “John” were going to divide S.R. into four monthlies, one appearing each week in rotation: the Saturday Review of Science, the Saturday Review of Education, the Saturday Review of the Arts, and the Saturday Review of the Society. “John and Nick have emphasized that the four monthly magazines are a natural outgrowth of...present [‘S.R.’] supplements. A number of the basic features of the existing ‘S.R.’ will be retained...to provide continuity.” So far, so good, or so bad, depending on one’s view of the old S.R.
But then “the strong bonds of affection” begin to show strain. Nothing unpleasant or explicit, you understand, that’s not the S.R. style. Only a Jeevesian admonitory murmur: “It is not my purpose here to enter a detailed discussion of that plan. It is sufficient to say [“m’Lord,” Wodehouse would have added] I find myself in philosophical and professional disagreement. I object strongly to the commercial use of the ‘Saturday Review’ subscription list for purposes that have nothing to do with the magazine. [No details; Jeeves was good on details.] I also object to the exploitation of the name of