Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [29]
And this is just about as far as the play goes. Those who question the values of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, 1901, are presented as grotesques while Editor Webb is presented as the norm. This might be justified as historical realism—although small-town editors fifty years ago were often crusaders and idealists—but of course Mr. Wilder is not interested in the actual 1901 Grover’s Corners. “Our Town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire Village,” he wrote in the preface to the 1957 edition, “or as a speculation about the conditions of life after death (that element I merely took from Dante’s Purgatory). [The “merely” is a master touch.—D.M.] It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.” This is a half truth, which means it is mostly false. Not that Mr. Wilder is in any way insincere. Had he been, he could no more have written a Midcult masterpiece like Our Town than Norman Rockwell could have painted all those Post covers. But if one compares with Our Town a similar attempt to find a value “for the smallest events in our everyday lives,” namely Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, one sees the difference between a work of art and a sincere bit of Kitsch. What Mr. Wilder is really doing is nothing either so personal or so universal as he thinks it is. He is constructing a social myth, a picture of a golden age that is a paradigm for today. He has the best of both tenses—the past is veiled by the nostalgic feelings of the present, while the present is softened by being conveyed in terms of a safely remote past. But what a myth and what a golden age! Here one does get a little impatient with the talented Mr. Wilder.
The stage manager is its demiurge. He is the perfect American pragmatist, folksy and relaxed because that’s jest the way things are and if anybuddy hankers to change ’em that’s their right only (pause, business of drawing reflectively on pipe) chances are ’t won’t make a sight of difference (pipe business again) things don’t change much in Grover’s Corners. There is no issue too trivial for him not to take a stand on. “That’s the end of the first act, friends,” he tells the audience. “You can go smoke now”—adding with a touch of genius, “those that smoke.” Don’t do any harm, really, one way or t’other.
XIII
The special threat of Midcult is that it exploits the discoveries of the avant-garde. This is something new. Midcult’s historical predecessor, Academicism, resembled it in being Kitsch for the elite, outwardly High Culture but really as much a manufactured article as the cheaper cultural goods produced for the masses. The difference is that Academicism was intransigently opposed to the avant-garde. It included painters like Bouguereau, Alma-Tadema, and Rosa Bonheur; critics like Edmund Gosse and Edmund Clarence Stedman; composers like Sir Edward Elgar; poets like Alfred Austin and Stephen Phillips; writers like Rostand, Stevenson, Cabell, and Joseph Hergesheimer.[12] Academicism in its own dreary way was at least resisting Masscult. It had standards, the old ones, and it educated the nouveaux riches, some of whom became so well educated that they graduated to an appreciation of the avant-garde, realizing that it was carrying on the spirit of the tradition which the Academics were killing. It is possible to see Academicism as the growing pains of High Culture, the restrictive chrysalis from which something new might emerge. That it was always destroyed after a few decades carries out the simile—who looks at Alma-Tadema today, who reads Hergesheimer?
Midcult is a more dangerous opponent of High Culture because it incorporates so much of the avant-garde. The four works noticed above were more advanced and sophisticated, for their time, than were the novels of John Galsworthy. They are, so to speak, the products of lapsed