Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [34]
This is all very well and indeed extremely well. For this is not Midcult but for the most part the unadulterated article.[13] The books are the complete texts, the music is uncut and well performed, the art works the best going, the movies usually interesting (though there is an admixture of Brigitte Bardot, you gotta live), the off-Broadway plays usually serious and the community-theatre ones often so.
Nor is this all that can be said. It is probably no easier today to make a living in the marketplace by serious writing or painting or composing than it ever was, but since 1945 there have come into existence a whole new category of what the trade unionist calls “fringe benefits.” Institutional support of the poet, writer, artist, composer now goes far beyond teaching jobs to (1) foundation grants, (2) prizes and awards by all kinds of arts-and-letters groups, (3) lecture fees (one wonders how some people ever get any work done at all), (4) luxury junkets to East-West, North-South, Up-Down cultural gatherings all over the world, (5) Fulbright and other fellowships, (6) fees for advising literary aspirants at what are misnamed “writers’ conferences.” As Wallace Markfield put it in The New Leader of March 18, 1957: “No other generation...has pursued the Good Job quite so wisely and so well. This is not to say that they have consigned themselves to the gas chambers of Madison Avenue or Luceland. Far from it: their desks are more likely to be littered with Kenyon Review than with Printer’s Ink. To their lot fall the foundation plums, the berths with the better magazines and book-houses, the research sinecures. They are almost never unemployed; they are only between grants.” Similarly, Greenwich Village bohemians now make a comfortable living selling leather sandals and silver jewelry to the tourists, just like the Indians in New Mexico. Nowadays everybody lives on the reservation.
So much for the positive side of our current boom in culture. The chief negative aspect is that so far our Renaissance, unlike the original one, has been passive, a matter of consuming rather than creating, a catching up on our reading on a continental scale. The quality paperbacks sell mostly the Big Names already established in hard covers. The records and the 1,100 orchestras play Mozart and Stravinsky rather than Elliott Carter. The art museums show mostly old masters or new masters like Matisse, with a Jackson Pollock if they are very daring. The new theatres present almost entirely old plays: off-Broadway has done well by Chekhov, Shaw, Ibsen, O’Neill, Brecht, Beckett, and Shakespeare, but except for some examples of the Theatre of the Absurd, it has had almost nothing of significance by hitherto-unknown playwrights. We have, in short, become skilled at consuming High Culture when it has been stamped by the proper authorities, but we lack the kind of sophisticated audience that supported the achievements of the classic avant-garde, an audience that can appreciate and discriminate on its own.
For this more difficult enterprise, we shall need what we very well may not get for all our four million college population: a cultural community. The term is pompous but I can think of no more accurate one. It is strange how many brain-workers we have and how few intellectuals, how many specialists whose knowledge and interest are confined to their own “field” and how few generalists whose interests are broad and nonprofessional. A century ago Lord Melbourne, himself a strikingly nonspecialized and indeed rather ignorant intellectual, observed: “A man may be master of the ancient and modern languages and yet his manners shall not be in the least degree softened