Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [157]
I joked about “Grin” not for an ethnic put-down, since I have no idea of its provenance—Finnish? Czech? Scandinavian? German? Turkish? Serb?—but because it is, after all, a noun meaning “a wide smile” and so struck me as the perfect nom de guerre for a midcult entrepreneur. (“How cheerfully he seems to grin, / How neatly spreads his claws, / And welcomes little fishes in / With gently smiling jaws!”—Lewis Carroll.)[5] I admit I consider “Grin” a funny name in some contexts, including my article. If I’d inherited it, I’d have changed it to something like, say, “Grinegar.” And if I was unwilling to let down the ancestral house, I’d have called myself “S.S. Grin,” or “Samuel S. Grin” but never, never “S. Spencer Grin,” which strikes just the note of fusty pomposity that invites a hot-foot.
Finally, I don’t understand why Mr. Brinegar’s name has “been ridiculed so much.” Because it echoes “vinegar”? Even I would pass that one up.
Finally finally, if Mr. Brinegar is so persnickety about names, why does he misspell mine three times in a brief note? “MacDonald” is the normal mistake; “McDonald” takes real talent.
The silence from the editors of World has been, as they might say, deafening. Erik Wensberg invited every one of those I mentioned to defend, attack, correct, object, protest, explain—anything—generously offering them all the space they needed to set the record straight; a real First Amendment editor. No go and no comment. I wasn’t surprised. The objects, or victims, of my “fulminations” have rarely riposted (in print, anyway) and never in the case of the quantitative Goliaths. Their reasons, I’m immodest enough to think, have been prudential: too many specific criticisms that questioned the assumptions on which their commercially flourishing and culturally jejune enterprises were founded. Keep away from that tar-baby, Brer Fox!
So I didn’t expect any comeback, publicly, from anybody on World. There were some private back-stairs cudgelings, though, suitable for upstarts of low degree. One contributing editor wrote Wensberg a note of seventy-five words, not for publication, which said that the writer had long since decided to “ignore” me and my “twelve-word glossary,” and which reproached Wensberg for opening his pages to someone who could make another man’s name into a “private joke.” As a choice of issues, I’d say that shows a certain desperation. I don’t know what the reference to my “twelve-word glossary” means. My hunch is that the secretive letter-writer extrapolated from “masscult,” “midcult,” and “parajournalism,” and would be hard put to specify the other nine. Then too, someone’s secretary at World wrote that her boss thanked Wensberg for calling my article to “our” attention (regal, that “our”) but considered me a foeman unworthy of his steel because of my “unjustifiable tirade” against “such great minds as Buckminster Fuller and Norman Cousins.”
Afterword
On February 9, 1973, too late to be noticed in the above rundown—perfect timing—the Master of the Revels and Lord of Misrule himself, Norman Cousins, wrote Mr. Wensberg the following Masterful note: “Sorry to be so late in thanking you for your courtesy in letting me see the article by Dwight McDonald. Yes, what he said hurt. But I hope we learned something from it.” Well, class, the first lesson is how to spell my name....Naturally, after my conscientious debunking of Mr. Cousins and his magazine, I should have expected his career would zoom sharply upward, and so in fact it soon did: saturday review is bankrupt; norman cousins to run it again was a front-page headline in the Times of April 25, 1973, with a followup on July 6: “cousins’s world will be expanded/The Saturday Review/World Plans to Publish Soon.” Those two young kultur-hustlers, Veronis and Charney,