Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [3]
One of the jokes at Partisan Review was, “Dwight is looking for a disciple who will tell him what to think.” (It is uncertain whether Phillips or Delmore Schwartz made this up. Schwartz was famous for ridiculing Macdonald to his face; to the surprise of most observers, Macdonald seemed not to mind. Until Schwartz became too paranoid for anyone to talk to, the two remained friends.) Even in his Marxist period, Macdonald was not a systematic or even a consistent thinker. He was, innately, a journalist, and journalistic criticism is ad hoc. It concentrates on the object at hand. But he was drawn to Greenberg’s scheme. He adopted the avant-garde and kitsch, or high-low, distinction, and he adopted the historical account that went along with it: a story about the emergence of something called “the masses,” the destruction of folk art, and the rise of a debased commercial culture and its profit-seeking manufacturers—as Macdonald would come to call them, “the Lords of Kitsch.”
It was not as though these issues had never been pondered. The threat to serious culture posed by mass society and its tastes was a staple of modernist social and cultural criticism. In Britain, F.R. Leavis published his little book Mass Civilization and Minority Culture in 1930; Ortega y Gassett’s The Revolt of the Masses appeared in English translation in 1932. Nor was it as though these issues had never been pondered by Macdonald. On the contrary: he had always been an advocate for modernist writing—James Joyce was a hero; he had sought him out during a visit to Paris, in 1932—and a sharp judge of what he regarded as genteel vulgarity. William Lyon Phelps had been an early target. And, although he liked the movies, he had distinctly highbrow tastes—Chaplin, Stroheim, the early Eisenstein. By 1939, though, this was no longer merely a question of taste. It had become a question of politics. When Macdonald equated Stalinist cinema with Hollywood, he was not only saying that Soviet cinema had become a medium of inoffensive crowd-pleasing banality, he was saying that the American film industry was a top-down imposition of official ideology masquerading as representative of popular taste. Hollywood cinema was a spurious “people’s art.”
This was a critical standard that one could carry into battle. In 1943, Macdonald quit Partisan Review—he complained that the magazine had become too literary, that he was the last Marxist left—and, in 1944, he started up his own little magazine, Politics. Greenberg, who, through Macdonald’s offices, had come on as an editor at Partisan, had also resigned. He became art critic of The Nation in 1944; over the rest of the decade, he would turn himself into the champion of avant-garde American painting, particularly the later work of Jackson Pollock. He and Macdonald remained friendly, apart from some temporary fallings out, one after Greenberg beat up Lionel Abel at a cocktail party. The episode produced a short, two-fisted epistolary exchange. (DM: “I don’t see how it will be possible for me in future to have any personal relations with you.” CG: “You are a moral busybody. You should think a little more before you open your mouth.”) To Macdonald’s charge that he was always punching people, Greenberg replied that he had heretofore only punched surrealists. Apparently they didn’t count.
Macdonald’s own contribution to his first issue of Politics, which came out in February 1944, was “A Theory of Popular Culture.” The essay was a restatement of “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” minus Greenberg’s identification of avant-garde