Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [150]
A Times interview on June 22, inaccurately headed “IT’S A NEW WORLD FOR NORMAN COUSINS,” revealed that World was about to appear with an initial press-run of 175,000 copies, of which 100,000 went to subscribers, most of them veteran S.R. addicts. Cousins calls the latter his “family” and defines them with unexpected specificity: “When I think of a ‘Saturday Review’ reader, I think of a professor of biochemistry at, oh, S.M.U. His wife is a community leader. She helps to put on art festivals....Or, I think of a company vice president who lives in New Canaan. His wife plays the organ....They have musicales and serious discussions in their home....It’s a whole family....After my resignation a 12-year-old girl called me. She said, ‘Mommy wanted to write you, but each time she tried she broke down and cried.’ We’ve been through things together....I began to realize a long time ago that we were developing not so much readers as a constituency, a family.” Parody is disarmed before such candor. And what parodist would dare give World’s publisher the name S. Spencer Grin?
Volume I, Number 1 of World is dated July 4, which is probably a coincidence but does touch all bases, the patriotic along with the global. The proud rubric “A REVIEW OF IDEAS, THE ARTS AND THE HUMAN CONDITION” was dropped before Number 2, perhaps because it was too confining; certainly not because Mr. Cousins felt it was a bit gaseous—his gaseosity threshold is very high. I remember the only time I ever saw and, worse, heard him—at the Waldorf (or maybe the Roosevelt) for some Worthy Cause. My wife and I were free-loading off some friends, and the food and drinks were okay, and first Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., so big and handsome, said nothing for thirty-five minutes in the most dignified way and sat down at last (whew!); and then Norman Cousins, smaller and less handsome, arose and for forty minutes matched FDR’s vapidity (though in a more sincere style, of course), a feat I’d have thought impossible. What were they talking about? My wife can’t remember either. She says I shouldn’t attack Cousins “personally,” though his speech was lethal precisely because it was so smoothly impersonal. Well then, let’s get down to printed matter and the subject.
“This first issue of ‘World Magazine’ is dedicated to the future of print, and to our colleagues on other magazines, newspapers, and books,” Mr. Cousins begins his lead editorial, making me feel like a heel right away. “We are confident that print will not only endure but will continue to be a primary force in the life of the mind. Nothing yet invented meets the intellectual needs of the human brain so fully as print.” Now if “brain” is defined in the narrow nineteenth-century way, “intellectual” is tautologous; if in broader post-Freudian terms, a lot of other “needs” are not covered by “intellectual.” At all events, this ringing but uneasy defiance (“we are confident” means “we are not confident” in such official rhetoric, just as “undoubtedly” means “perhaps” and “obviously” “maybe”) seems to be aimed at Marshall McLuhan—though typically he isn’t mentioned. Cousinsland is like Eden before Adam got around to naming the animals: naming names, as Adam unhappily realized after he’d eaten that knowledgeable apple, only lowers the tone and raises doubts. It’s also typical in Cousinsland that the horse being beaten, anonymously, is safely dead; McLuhan’s anti-Gutenberg flash expired from the pan several years ago.
“‘World’ seeks to become a magazine on the human situation,” the editor plunges on, like a hippopotamus trying to extricate himself from a slough of molasses, to borrow Mencken’s description of an earlier