Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [22]
To which last the reply is, in terms of Rockwell’s covers, “Yep, sure is.” Yet, despite this credo, which every popular artist should have printed in red and black and hung over his drawing board alongside Kipling’s “If,” Rockwell still keeps worrying. He had another crisis a couple of years ago, at sixty-five, when he again wondered what he might have done “if I hadn’t gone commercial” and again began to talk of Picasso as “the greatest”; he took a year off to do some Serious painting (except for a mere six Post covers), with results unknown to me. He also wrote his autobiography. It is being serialized in the Post.
The other condition for success in Masscult is that the writer, artist, editor, director or entertainer must have a good deal of the mass man in himself, as was the case with Zane Grey, Howard Chandler Christy, Mr. Lorimer of the Post, Cecil B. DeMille, and Elvis Presley. This is closely related to sincerity—how can he take his work seriously if he doesn’t have this instinctive, this built-in vulgar touch? Like Rockwell, he may know that art is good and honorable and worthy of respect, and he may pay tribute to it. But knowing it is one thing and feeling it is another. A journalistic entrepreneur like Henry Luce—by no means the worst—has the same kind of idle curiosity about the Facts and the same kind of gee-whiz excitement about rather elementary ideas (see Life editorials passim) as his millions of readers have. When I worked for him on Fortune in the early ’thirties, I was struck by three qualities he had as an editor: his shrewdness as to what was and what was not “a story,” his high dedication to his task, and his limited cultural background despite, or perhaps because of, his having attended Yale College. All three are closely interrelated in his success: a more sophisticated editor would have gotten out of step with his millions of readers, a less idealistic one would have lacked the moral oomph to attract them, and he knew a “story” when he saw one because what interested them interested him.[7]
IX
As I have already noted in this essay, the separation of Folk Art and High Culture in fairly watertight compartments corresponded to the sharp line once drawn between the common people and the aristocracy. The blurring of this line, however desirable politically, has had unfortunate results culturally. Folk Art had its own authentic quality, but Masscult is at best a vulgarized reflection of High Culture and at worst a cultural nightmare, a Kulturkatzenjammer. And while High Culture could formerly address itself only to the cognoscenti, now it must take the ignoscenti into account even when it turns its back on them. For Masscult is not merely a parallel formation to High Culture, as Folk Art was; it is a competitor. The problem is especially acute in this country because class lines are especially weak here. If there were a clearly defined cultural elite here, then the masses could have their Kitsch and the classes could have their High Culture, with everybody happy. But a significant part of our population is chronically confronted with a choice between looking at TV or old masters, between reading Tolstoy or a detective story; i.e., the pattern of their cultural lives is “open” to the point of being porous. For a lucky few, this openness of choice is stimulating. But for most, it is confusing and leads at best to that middlebrow compromise called Midcult.
The turning point in our culture was the Civil War, whose aftermath destroyed the New England tradition almost as completely as the October Revolution broke the continuity of Russian culture. (Certain disturbing similarities between present-day American and Soviet Russian culture