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Audiences eat it up. They complain to the box office only on those rare occasions when Barrymore plays his part straight. Barrymore was not, by this time, exploiting his romantic personality; he was not even burlesquing it, since the ad libs—except for the crack about Lionel—were not funny. He was living on his capital, selling his gilt-edge bonds (his romantic reputation) and when he had liquidated them all (when the public began to think of him not as “the great John Barrymore” of the past but as the drunken cut-up of the present) he would have been bankrupt. Luckily, he died before that happened.

For their part, the mass public liked him in this final stage of disintegration precisely because it showed them he was no better than they were, in fact he was a good deal worse. In the “genius” act of the Masscult period, there is a strange ambivalence. The masses put an absurdly high value on the personal genius, the charisma, of the performer, but they also demand a secret rebate: he must play the game—their game—must distort his personality to suit their taste. Bryon did it when he wore an open collar and made sure that his hyacinthine locks were properly disordered. Robert Frost did it when he called a press conference, not so long ago, on moving into his office at the Library of Congress as Consultant on Poetry, and told the assembled reporters that his job might be called “Poet in Waiting” and further confided that he wanted some good paintings to hang in his office: “I want to get the place out of the small-potatoes class.” Even the staid New York Times was stimulated to headline its story: poet in waiting bids for a rating. That Frost is a fine poet isn’t relevant here; he is also a natural showman, and the relevant question is why our most distinguished poet feels it desirable to indulge this minor talent, clowning around like another Carl Sandburg. Bernard Shaw is the most interesting case of all, combining arrogance and subservience in the most dazzling way, as in the postcards he wrote to his admirers explaining why he couldn’t possibly be bothered to reply.

In Masscult (and in its bastard, Midcult) everything becomes a commodity, to be mined for $$$$, used for something it is not, from Davy Crockett to Picasso. Once a writer becomes a Name, that is, once he writes a book that for good or bad reasons catches on, the Masscult (or Midcult) mechanism begins to “build him up,” to package him into something that can be sold in identical units in quantity. He can coast along the rest of his life on momentum; publishers will pay him big advances just to get his Name on their list; his charisma becomes such that people will pay him $250 and up to address them (really just to see him); editors will reward him handsomely for articles on subjects he knows nothing about. Artists and writers have always had a tendency to repeat themselves, but Masscult (and Midcult) make it highly profitable to do so and in fact penalize those who don’t. Some years ago, I’m told, a leading abstract artist complained to a friend that he was tired of the genre that had made him famous and wanted to try something else; but his gallery insisted such a shift would be commercially disastrous and, since he had children to send through college, he felt obliged to comply. Or compare the careers of James T. Farrell and Norman Mailer. The former made a reputation with the Studs Lonigan trilogy in the early ’thirties and his many books since then have gone on repeating the mixture as before; although his later books have won small critical esteem, he is still considered a major American writer and still gathers all the perquisites and emoluments thereof; Farrell is a standard and marketable commodity, like Jello. Although Mailer is still a Name, with plenty of p. and e., he has crossed up his public and his publishers by refusing to repeat himself. His reputation was made with his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948, but he has insisted