• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1124 0

overextended themselves financially (“about three million in debts, largely for printing, according to well-placed sources”); their quadruple splitting of the S.R. atom blew up in their faces.[6] Uncle Norman is picking up the pieces, taking over 800,000 subscribers to S.R. Sciences, Arts, Education, and Society and adding them to the 178,000 World subscribers; whether he can digest such a 300 percent overnight expansion in circulation is by no means clear—the whole deal has murky aspects—and his July 6 press release was still extremely vague: “The new Saturday Review/World will have a highly contemporary flavor. I expect the design will be stronger, brighter and more accessible....Our aim is to publish for a very compact, high-value readership of 550,000.” Last fall, when I was more confident as a Cassandra, I’d have thought the new name not inspired and would have questioned each of the above adjectives. But now—who knows? Not me. When the midcult audience is the problem, I feel (not for the first time, but more poignantly than hitherto) that my vision is a reversed-mirror image of the reality—the practical or sales reality, that is. Cf. my deflation of Swanberg’s biography of Henry Luce, later in this section, which was of course followed in a few months by the book’s winning a Pulitzer award. Every knock a boost.

[1]I’ve complained about this for twenty-eight years if you count from my first full-dress formulation, “A Theory of Popular Culture,” in the February, 1944, number of my late magazine Politics; forty-five, if you begin with “The Teaching of English at Yale” (Yale Lit., 1927), a long grouse about the crowd-pleasing pop-romantic antics certain eminent English profs went in for to hold the interest of a lecture hall full of future stockbrokers.

[2]The more successful (by a factor of about twenty) Reader’s Digest is not middlebrow but lowbrow, or maybe by now upper-lowbrow; let’s say pale blue-collar. It lacks the cultural pretensions, the little finger crooked over the teacup of Canby’s and Cousins’s Saturday Review. It’s just a simple mid-American kaffeeklatsch, easy and relaxed (“My Most Unforgettable Character,” Herman Wouk on The Zionist in Me, Admiral Byrd on My Antarctica), except when incendiary stimuli like Communism or Abortion on Demand turn it into a mid-Amerikan barbecue. But it’s no longer just American: the success of its international editions in French, Italian, Spanish, and other civilized tongues is ominous. A little touch of vulgarity makes the whole world subscribe.

[3](1973) It was Shnayerson of Harper’s. See Appendix.

[4]A striking phrase, but has anyone ever done it?

[5](1973) Cf. also Poe’s essay, “Diddling / Considered as one of the Exact Sciences.” The ninth, and climactic, trait of the diddler is: “Grin:—Your true diddler winds up all with a grin. But this nobody sees but himself. He grins when his daily work is done... at night in his own closet, and altogether for his own private entertainment. He goes home. He locks his door. He divests himself of his clothes. He puts out his candle. He gets into bed. All this done, and your diddler grins. This is no hypothesis....I reason a priori, and a diddle would be no diddle without a grin.”

[6]For a detailed, fascinating inside view of the hows and whys of the debacle, see William H. Horan’s “The Morning After The Saturday Review,” in Esquire for November, 1973.

Sources

“Masscult and Midcult”: Partisan Review, Spring, 1960.

“James Agee”: The New Yorker, November 16, 1957.

“Ernest Hemingway”: Encounter, January, 1962.

“By Cozzens Possessed”: Commentary, January, 1958.

“The Book-of-the-Millenium Club”: The New Yorker, November 29, 1952.

“Updating the Bible”: The New Yorker, November 14, 1953.

“The String Untuned”: The New Yorker, March 10, 1962.

“The Triumph of the Fact”: Anchor Review, 1957.

“Parajournalism”: The New York Review of Books, published in two parts: “Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe and His Magic Writing Machine,” August 26, 1965; and “Parajournalism II: Wolfe and The New Yorker,” February 3, 1966.

“Norman Cousins