• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1086 0

appears to be up. Ella Wheeler Wilcox yields to Stephen Vincent Benét. Maxfield Parrish’s Day Dreams is replaced on the living-room wall by Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, or even a Picasso print. Billy Sunday’s Bible-shouting acrobatics are toned down to Billy Graham’s more civilized approach, though with what gain to religious feeling has yet to be seen. In literary criticism, the artless enthusiasm of a William Lyon Phelps has modulated into the more restrained yea-saying of a Clifton Fadiman or a Granville Hicks. The late Arthur Brisbane used to speculate in short, punchy paragraphs separated by asterisks (they have been compared to the pauses a barroom philosopher makes to spit reflectively into the sawdust) on such topics as whether a gorilla could beat up a heavyweight champion in fair fight; but he would hardly go over as a columnist today, not even in that Hearst press whose circulation he swelled fifty years ago. He has been superseded by types like Dr. Max Lerner of the New York Post, who can bring Freudian theory to bear on the sex life of Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher. Dr. Lerner was once managing editor of the Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences; more recently he compiled a Midcult classic titled America as a Civilization in which he amassed 1,036 pages of data and interpretations without offending any religious, racial, political or social group. It is a solemn thought what he would do with Brisbane’s man v. gorilla problem; as I recall, Brisbane finally concluded the gorilla would win; Dr. Lerner would probably take a more rounded viewpoint; his humanistic frame of reference would incline him to favor the heavyweight, but he would be careful to explain that no intrinsic inferiority was involved; just a matter of social environment. Gorillas are people too.

A tepid ooze of Midcult is spreading everywhere. Psychoanalysis is expounded sympathetically and superficially in popular magazines. Institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the American Civil Liberties Union, once avant-garde and tiny, are now flourishing and respectable; but something seems to have been mislaid in the process, perhaps their raison d’être. Hollywood movies aren’t as terrible as they once were, but they aren’t as good either; the general level of taste and craftsmanship has risen but there are no more great exceptions like Griffith, von Stroheim, Chaplin, Keaton; Orson Welles was the last, and Citizen Kane is twenty years old. An enterprising journalist, Vance Packard, has manufactured two best sellers by summarizing the more sensational findings of the academic sociologists, garnishing the results with solemn moralizings, and serving it up under catchy titles: The Hidden Persuaders, The Status Seekers. Bauhaus modernism has seeped down, in a vulgarized form, into the design of our vacuum cleaners, pop-up toasters, supermarkets and cafeterias.

The question, of course, is whether all this is merely growing pains—or, in more formal language, an expression of social mobility. Don’t rising social classes always go through a nouveau riche phase in which they imitate the forms of culture without understanding its essence? And won’t these classes in time be assimilated into High Culture? It is true that this has usually happened in the past. But I think there is a difference now. Before the last century, the standards were generally agreed on and the rising new classes tried to conform to them. By now, however, because of the disintegrative effects of Masscult I described in the first part of this essay, the standards are by no means generally accepted. The danger is that the values of Midcult, instead of being transitional—“the price of progress”—may now themselves become a debased, permanent standard.

I see no reason Midcult may not be stabilized as the norm of our culture. Why struggle with real poetry when the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric can give you its effects in capsule form—works twice as fast and has a “Blow on the coal of the heart” ending? Why read the sociologists when Mr. Packard gives you their gist painlessly?

XV

This whole