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absurdly as they idealize ours. In 1959 I gave a talk on mass culture at a Universities & Left Review forum in London. I expected the audience, which was much younger than I, to object to my lack of enthusiasm for socialism, though it was distressing to find them still talking about capitalism and the working class in the simplistic terms I hadn’t heard since I left the Trotskyists; the problems we thought about in the ’thirties seem to be just coming up now in England; the illusions we were forced to abandon seem still current there. But what I was not prepared for was the reaction to my attacks on our mass culture. These were resented in the name of democracy. Hollywood to me was an instance of the exploitation rather than the satisfying of popular tastes. But to some of those who took the floor after my talk, Hollywood was a genuine expression of the masses. They seemed to think it snobbish of me to criticize our movies and television from a serious viewpoint. Since I had been criticizing Hollywood for some thirty years, and always with the good conscience one has when one is attacking from the Left, this proletarian defense of our peculiar institution left me rather dazed.

[15]This essay, in an abbreviated form, was originally written for The Saturday Evening Post as one of its “Adventures of the Mind” series. (The introduction of this series into the Post two years ago—it has included Randall Jarrell, C. P. Snow and Clement Greenberg—is an interesting symptom of the post-1945 renaissance. George Horace Lorimer never thought his magazine needed a highbrow look.) The last three sentences above about The New Yorker, which appear exactly as they did in the final version I submitted to the Post, were responsible for the article’s rejection.

In the fall of 1958, the Post invited me to contribute an article to the series and since they offered $2,500 for 5,000 words and promised to let me say what I liked, I agreed. A year later—after a five-page summary had been agreed on—I sent in the piece. They had perhaps a dozen editorial objections, all but one of which I accepted as either trivial or justified. The one difficulty was their suggestion that The New Yorker was just another Midcult magazine and that I must therefore criticize it in the same terms as the others. Since I did not agree with this opinion—and had in fact evaluated The New Yorker quite differently, though not without criticism, in the November, 1956, Encounter—I resisted. As the correspondence developed, it became clear they thought I was “going easy” on The New Yorker because I worked for it, a not unreasonable assumption in a police court but one that I somehow resented. The sentences above were my final attempt to “place” the magazine. It was rejected and so was the article (“otherwise eminently acceptable” wrote the sub-editor I dealt with). I finally wrote to Mr. Ben Hibbs, the editor-in-chief (how perfect a name, one of Norman Rockwell’s covers come to life!) complaining that I had been promised a free hand as to opinion and that the Post had reneged. He was not sympathetic. “We are dealing here with facts, not opinion,” he replied, adding that unless I came clean on The New Yorker, the piece would be “open to suspicion of insincerity.” Mr. Hibbs’ notion of fact and opinion seemed to me mistaken and I wrote back citing my dictionary’s definition of fact (“a truth known by actual experience or observation”) and opinion (“a judgment or estimate of a person or thing with respect to character, merit, etc.”). He replied suggesting the correspondence be closed. I replied agreeing but could not resist a few Parthian shots, namely: (1) in future the Post should employ some reliable detective agency—I suggested Pinkerton’s—to make an advance assessment of the moral character of contributors to their Adventures of the Mind; (2) if I had accepted under pressure their opinion of The New Yorker, this should have shaken their confidence in the honesty of my other opinions; (3) the Post owed me $1,500—I had been foresighted enough to insist on $1,000 on delivery of