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By Root 1026 0

present journalism is a conceptualized picture of the reader. [Mary McCarthy wrote several years ago in a prospectus for a monthly of political, social and cultural comment which never materialized because we couldn’t get enough backing.] The reader, in this view, is a person stupider than the editor whom the editor both fears and patronizes. He plays the same role the child plays in the American home and school, the role of an inferior being who must nevertheless be propitiated. What our readers will take is the watchword....When an article today is adulterated, this is not done out of respect for the editor’s prejudices (which might at least give us an individualistic and eccentric journalism) but in deference to the reader’s averageness and supposed stupidity. The fear of giving offense to some hypothetical dolt and the fear of creating a misunderstanding have replaced the fear of advertisers’ reprisals.

The new magazine’s editors do not accept this picture of the reader; they make no distinction between the reader and themselves. And in fact they insist on this as a cardinal democratic premise; the only premise on which free communication between human beings can be carried on. They do not look upon Critic as a permanent philanthropic enterprise. They believe there are 100,000 people in a country of 150,000,000 who will buy it regularly, once they have been made aware of its existence.

As I say, the money was not raised and Critic did not appear. But I don’t think Mary McCarthy’s estimate of the possible circulation was unrealistic; a masochistic underestimation of the audience for good work in every field, even the movies, even television, is typical of the American cultural entrepreneur. Some good movies have made money, after all, and many bad ones, though concocted according to the most reliable formulae, have failed to. Nobody really knows and it seems to me more democratic, as Miss McCarthy observes, to assume that one’s audience is on one’s own level than that they are the “hypothetical dolts” which both the businessmen of Hollywood and the revolutionaries of the Universities & Left Review [now New Left Review] assume they are.

Recently a friend had a manuscript rejected by a prominent Midcult magazine. “It’s full of speculative aperçus,” wrote the editor, “but it’s just not a ‘journalistic’ piece of the kind we need. What I mean is, it is too speculative. I find the speculations fascinating [they always do] but they simply go beyond the pragmatics of the problems, which are necessarily crucial to us.” This attitude, of course, is neither new nor limited to this country. One recalls the report that Edward Garnett wrote in 1916 for the London firm of Duckworth, which was considering a manuscript by an obscure Irish writer.

[It] wants going through carefully from start to finish. There are many ‘longueurs.’ Passages which, though the publisher’s reader may find them entertaining, will be tedious to the ordinary man among the reading public. That public will call the book, as it stands at present, realistic, unprepossessing, unattractive. We call it ably written. The picture is ‘curious,’ it arouses interest and attention. But the...point of view will be voted ‘a little sordid.’....Unless the author will use restraint and proportion, he will not gain readers.

The book was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Mr. Garnett was one of a celebrated English literary family, and the episode (see Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, 416–419) shows the limitations of my Anglophilia, if the point needs demonstrating. For the first edition of the Portrait was finally published by an American, B.W. Huebsch.

In some ways the closest parallel we have to the British weeklies is The New Yorker, which has always been edited with the assumption that the readers have the same tastes as the editors and so need not be in any way appeased or placated; the reader is the forgotten man around The New Yorker, whose editors insist on making their own mistakes, a formula that has worked for thirty years of successful publishing, perhaps