Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [156]
So when Erik Wensberg sent me the first two issues of World and suggested that, in view of the discrepancy between their quality and Mr. Cousins’s prestige as an editor, I might like to have a look and make a few remarks, I gritted my teeth and plowed through them; they were, in fact, even worse than I’d expected from Cousins’s old Saturday Review days; thus, I felt it was my duty (and pleasure) to rise, or sink, to the occasion. Rosinante to the road again! A few “fulminations” may have inadvertently crept in, and if so, I do apologize, my only excuse being a desire to relieve the reader’s and my own ennui in exploring so flat a world. Whether Forum readers in general were “enlightened,” I don’t know; but I do know that those I heard from directly were unexpectedly numerous and applausive. It seems that letting the hot air out of Norman Cousins’s inflated reputation as a thinker and moralist filled, as he might put it, a long-felt need.
I enjoyed, if that’s the word, the midcultification or evisceration of Mr. Cousins in The Columbia Forum, though it might be nice if Dwight Macdonald picked on someone his own size.
Nonetheless, it falls to me, I fear, to note an error that somewhat pains us. Alfred W. McCoy is anything but what Mr. Macdonald called him—a former CIA man. He’s a Yale graduate student. Furthermore, the magazine that first (last July) published a portion of McCoy’s heroin exposé was Harper’s, not The Atlantic. I spent months developing and excerpting that piece, and while Robert Manning is a great fellow, immodesty compels me to inform you that in this (rare) case, Macdonald cited the wrong Robert.
Robert Shnayerson
Editor-in-Chief
Harper’s Magazine, New York, N.Y.
Dwight Macdonald writes:
Sorry about crediting The Atlantic instead of Harper’s for the real McCoy; apologies all the more abject because my own clips indicate Harper’s. But I don’t quite know what Mr. Shnayerson means by “it might be nice if Dwight Macdonald picked on someone his own size.” He seems to be both deriding Cousins and feeling sorry for him—a tricky stance. “Size” is also a tricky term here. Agreed that qualitatively Cousins is David to my Goliath—or so I read Mr. Shnayerson’s point, a modest encomium—but in quantitative terms it’s the other way around, as it was with the midcult products I recalled above for Mr. Griffing. Myself, I assume it’s a useful function to criticize such influential Goliaths. If critics like me only fought in their own intellectual weight class—I’m in those matches too, often enough—who would and could take on the mass-market heavyweights?
Dwight McDonald’s article on Norman Cousins and World in The Columbia Forum...contains criticisms with which I disagree, but which undeniably you have a right to publish. I do question the basic decency, however, of allowing Mr. McDonald to ridicule Mr. Cousins’s and Mr. Grin’s names.
Perhaps I am sensitive because my own name has been ridiculed so much. But it is improper to make a public joke of a person’s name, his ethnic origin, his color, his creed, his politics, or his clothes if he is poor. I recall the attacks made on Franklin Roosevelt, including the crude, insensitive, and anti-Semitic statements about “that Jew, Rosenfeld.” Mr. McDonald’s remarks about Mr. Cousins’s and Mr. Grin’s names disturbingly reminded me of that sort of thing.
David F. Brinegar
Executive Editor
The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson, Arizona
Dwight Macdonald writes:
Two or three other readers have objected to my making fun of Mr. Grin’s name, but only Mr. Brinegar has also charged me with lèse-majesté about Mr. Cousins’s name. On rereading my essay I find no kidding of Mr. Cousins’s name, unless a mild, nonpejorative pun on “cousin” is so considered by my hypersensitive correspondent. I did have fun, twice, with “S. Spencer Grin” as a name, and God knows I’d have refrained—Mr. Grin’s magazine affords many other, and better, laughs—had I foreseen that it would upset Mr. Brinegar so much.