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By Root 991 0

cannot help putting himself into his work. The unhappy hero of James’s story, “The Next Time,” tried again and again to prostitute his talents and write a best seller to support his family, but each time he created another unprofitable masterpiece; with the best will in the world, he was simply unable to achieve a low enough standard. The reverse is also true: a hack will turn out hack stuff even when he tries to be serious. Most of these examples will come later under Midcult, but Masscult also has its little tragedies. When I was in Hollywood recently, I was told by one of the most intelligent younger directors, Stanley Kubrick: “The reason movies are often so bad out here isn’t because the people who make them are cynical money hacks. Most of them are doing the very best they can; they really want to make good movies. The trouble is with their heads, not their hearts.” This was borne out by the film I was there to write about, a mawkish travesty of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts that was written and produced by Dore Schary with the noblest intentions.

There seem to be two main conditions for the successful production of Kitsch. One is that the producer must believe in what he is doing. A good example is Norman Rockwell, who since 1916 has painted over three hundred covers for The Saturday Evening Post. When a fellow illustrator remarked that their craft was just a way to make a living—“You do your job, you get your check, and nobody thinks it’s art”—Rockwell was horrified. “Oh no no no. How can you say that? No man with a conscience can just bat out illustrations. He’s got to put all of his talent, all of his feelings into them.” Having just seen a most interesting exhibition of Rockwell’s techniques at a local bank, I think he was telling the truth. He makes dozens of careful, highly competent pencil sketches, plus oil renderings of details, for just one Post cover; if genius were really “an infinite capacity for taking pains,” Norman Rockwell would be a genius. The trouble is that the final result of all this painstaking craftsmanship is just—a Post cover, as slick and cliché in execution as in content. “There’s this magazine cover,” says the comedian Mort Sahl, “and it shows this kid getting his first haircut you know and a dog is licking his hand and his mother is crying and it’s Saturday night in the old home town and people are dancing outside in the streets and the Liberty Bell is ringing and, uh, did I miss anything?” But Rockwell is sincere, so much so that he constantly wonders whether he is living up to his talents. In the ’twenties, according to a profile in the Post, he went through a crisis as comic as it was pathetic:

Professional friends, dabbling in modernism, told him he ought to learn something about dynamic symmetry, and their arguments worried him....Rockwell packed up and went to Paris. He attended lectures and bought Picassos to hang in his studio for inspiration. On his return he set about applying what he had learned to Post covers. When editor George Horace Lorimer examined the first new Rockwell offerings, he laid them aside and gave the artist a paternal lecture on the value of being one’s self, pointing out in passing that it was conceivably better to have one’s work displayed on the Post’s covers than embalmed in art museums. Chastened, Rockwell agreed and went back to being himself. He now refers to his temporary aberration as “my James-Joyce-Gertrude-Stein period.”

Lorimer’s missionary work was completed by a Stanford girl Rockwell married a few years later, a nice, sensible young bride who in good American fashion “helped get him back on the beam and keep him there.” In this not exactly Herculean task, she appears to have succeeded. He was positively defiant some years ago when he was being interviewed for a New Yorker profile:

My creed is that painting pictures of any kind is a definite form of expression and that illustration is the principal pictorial form of conveying ideas and telling funny stories. The critics say that any proper picture should be primarily a series of technical