Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [155]
They are both still plugging away in Number 7, U Thant on “A New Deal for Europe?” (I wouldn’t read a piece by that title if it were by George Bernard Shaw) and Bucky, ever hopeful, with “Geosocial Revolution” (I might read a piece so entitled if Benchley or Thurber had signed it). In fact I did peek at the last sentence of that one—the weakness for avant-garde bull already noted—and was fascinated: “There is, therefore, a deep subconscious passion in man which now stimulates his intuitions to strike for realization of the historically held ‘impossible’ and now looming reality of physical success for all humanity.” I wondered if he meant by “physical success” what I do—namely feeling good when I wake up—and when he expected this “reality” to progress from the looming to the actual. (In my case, next September is the deadline.) Or by “physical success” did he mean immortality. So I began at the beginning and immediately ran into a roadblock: “Though dwarfing all other of history’s revolutions in relative magnitude of transformation of human affairs in the universe, the vital characteristics and overall involvements of the twentieth-century revolution have gone on entirely unapprehended for one half of a century.” Impressive but marking time, you might say; nor did the rest of the paragraph advance towards that looming “physical success”; on the contrary, a distinctly circular, retrograde movement seemed to be setting in. So I decided to reread My Life and Hard Times. I’m a busy man.
In 7 as in 1, the other regular columnists persist and are still competitive with the two stars, Fuller and Thant, the lead-dust twins. Hollis Alpert still does movies; he’s better than his predecessor on the old S.R., Arthur Knight, but who isn’t? Goodman Ace (“veteran humorist—remember radio’s ‘Easy Aces’?” he is blurbed; I do indeed) still gives out with labored stand-up jocosity in “Top of the World.” John Ciardi, an S.R. oldtimer, still reminisces with tepid garrulity in “As I Was Saying,” the ancient mariner of midcult. And Cleveland Amory still runs his scrapbook of clippings. Amory’s opening shot was an odd misfire, by the way: he heads a reprint from the London Economist “Parody of the Fortnight”; either he has a very extensive idea of a fortnight or Willard Espy, whom he thanks for it, neglected to tell him it originally appeared in 1959 (and may be read in my own 1960 anthology of parodies). Amory’s column is headed “Curmudgeon at Large” but he is a very amateur curmudgeon (speaking as an expert one).
The publisher of World is still S. Spencer Grin.
—The Columbia Forum, Fall, 1972
Appendix:
THE CRITIC AT BAY
The following exchanges appeared in the Winter, 1973, issue of The Columbia Forum.
Re: Dwight Macdonald’s article on Norman Cousins’s new World magazine: doesn’t The Forum have more constructive use for its pages? If World is too “midcult” for Mr. Macdonald’s sophistication, he is under no obligation to read it, and I doubt that Forum readers are enlightened by his fulminations.
A.H. Griffing
Granville, N.Y.
Dwight Macdonald writes:
Mr. Griffing’s note strikes at the raison d’être of my career. I’ve always specialized in negative criticism—literary, political, cinematic, cultural—because I’ve found so few contemporary products about which I could be “constructive” without hating myself in the morning. Mr. Cousins’s unfortunate magazine and cultural influence are the latest of a series of impostures and vulgarizations I’ve thought needed to have the mickey taken out of them pro bono publico. Earlier examples of this effort include the third edition of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party campaign, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, the Adler-Hutchins