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on developing, or at least changing, since then, and his three subsequent books have little in common, in either style or content, with his first great success. From the Masscult (or Midcult) point of view, he has jeopardized a sound investment in order to gratify his personal interests. “When a writer gets hold of a sure thing,” Somerset Maugham, who should know, once observed, “you may expect him to hang on to it for a lifetime, like a dog worrying a bone.” This is not at all to imply that James T. Farrell is deliberately hanging on to his bone for profit or prestige, or that Norman Mailer changes his bones for idealistic reasons. The truth probably is that the former really enjoys mumbling the same old bone while the latter, perhaps because he is more volatile and talented, has wanted to try something new. But the result is that Farrell has got a lot of mileage out of very little gas, while Mailer is still a real problem to his publishers.

VIII

Let us, finally, consider Masscult first from the standpoint of consumption and then from that of production.

As a marketable commodity. Masscult has two great advantages over High Culture. One has already been considered: the post-1750 public, lacking the taste and knowledge of the old patron class, is not only satisfied with shoddy mass-produced goods but in general feels more at home with them (though on unpredictable occasions, they will respond to the real thing, as with Dickens’ novels and the movies of Chaplin and Griffith). This is because such goods are standardized and so are easier to consume since one knows what’s coming next—imagine a Western in which the hero loses the climactic gun fight or an office romance in which the mousy stenographer loses out to the predatory blonde. But standardization has a subtler aspect, which might be called The Built-In Reaction. As Clement Greenberg noted in “Avant-garde and Kitsch” many years ago in Partisan Review, the special aesthetic quality of Kitsch—a term which includes both Masscult and Midcult—is that it “predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a shortcut to the pleasures of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in the genuine art” because it includes the spectator’s reactions in the work itself instead of forcing him to make his own responses. That standby of provincial weddings, “I Love You Truly,” is far more “romantic” than the most beautiful of Schubert’s songs because its wallowing, yearning tremolos and glissandos make it clear to the most unmusical listener that something very tender indeed is going on. It does his feeling for him; or, as T.W. Adorno has observed of popular music, “The composition hears for the listener.” Thus Liberace is a much more “musical” pianist than Serkin, whose piano is not adorned with antique candelabra and whose stance at it is as business-like as Liberace’s is “artistic.” So, too, our Collegiate Gothic, which may be seen in its most resolutely picturesque (and expensive) phase at Yale, is more relentlessly Gothic than Chartres, whose builders didn’t even know they were Gothic and so missed many chances for quaint effects.[6] And so, too, Boca Raton, the millionaires’ suburb that Addison Mizener designed in Palm Beach during the Great Bull Market of the ’twenties, is so aggressively Spanish Mission that a former American ambassador to Spain is said to have murmured in awe, “It’s more Spanish than anything I ever saw in Madrid.” The same Law of the Built-In Reaction also insures that a smoothly air-brushed pin-up girl by Petty is more “sexy” than a real naked woman, the emphasis of breasts and thighs corresponding to the pornographically exaggerated Gothic details of Harkness. More sexy but not more sexual, the relation between the terms being similar to that of sentimentality to sentiment or modernistic to modern, or arty to art.

The production of Masscult is a subtler business than one might think. We have already seen in the case of Poe that a serious writer will produce art even when he is trying to function as a hack, simply because he