Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [25]
XI
But perhaps the best way to define Midcult is to analyze certain typical products. The four I have chosen are Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Archibald MacLeish’s J.B. and Stephen Vincent Benét’s John Brown’s Body. They have all been Midcult successes: each has won the Pulitzer Prize, has been praised by critics who should know better, and has been popular not so much with the masses as with the educated classes. Technically, they are advanced enough to impress the midbrows without worrying them. In content, they are “central” and “universal,” in that line of hollowly portentous art which the French call pompier after the glittering, golden beplumed helmets of their firemen. Mr. Wilder, the cleverest of the four, has actually managed to be at once ultra-simple and grandiose. “Now there are some things we all know, but we don’t take ’m out and look at ’m very often,” says his stage manager, sucking ruminatively on his pipe. “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars....Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.” The last sentence is an eleven-word summary, in form and content, of Midcult. I agree with everything Mr. Wilder says but I will fight to the death against his right to say it in this way.
The Old Man and the Sea was (appropriately) first published in Life in 1952. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and it helped Hemingway win the Nobel Prize in 1954 (the judges cited its “style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration”). It is written in that fake-biblical prose Pearl Buck used in The Good Earth, a style which seems to have a malign fascination for the midbrows—Miss Buck also got a Nobel Prize out of it. There are only two characters, who are not individualized because that would take away from the Universal Significance. In fact they are not even named, they are simply “the old man” and “the boy”—I think it was a slip to identify the fish as a marlin though, to be fair, it is usually referred to as “the great fish.” The dialogue is at once quaint (democracy) and dignified (literature). “Sleep well, old man,” quothes The Boy; or, alternatively, “Wake up, old man.” It is also very poetic, as The Boy’s speech: “I can remember the tail slapping and banging...and the noise of you clubbing him like chopping a tree down and the sweet blood smell all over me.” (Even the Old Man is startled by this cadenza. “Can you really remember that?” he asks.) In the celebrated baseball dialogues we have a fusion of Literature & Democracy:
“The great DiMaggio is himself again. I think of Dick Sisler and those great drives in the old park....The Yankees cannot lose.”
“But I fear the Indians of Cleveland.”
“Have faith in the Yankees, my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.”
And this by the man who practically invented realistic dialogue.
It is depressing to compare this story with “The Undefeated,” a bullfighting story Hemingway wrote in the ’twenties when, as he would say, he was knocking them out of the park. Both have the same theme: an old-timer, scorned as a has-been, gets one last chance; he loses (the fish is eaten by sharks, the bullfighter is gored) but his defeat is a moral victory, for he has shown that his will and courage are still intact. The contrast