Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [6]
The point was brought home to Macdonald rather forcefully—and, typically, he included a complete account of the affair in Against the American Grain. He had written “Masscult and Midcult” in 1959 on commission for The Saturday Evening Post. When the editors suggested that he ought, in fairness, to include The New Yorker among his examples of Midcult, Macdonald declined. They pressed their point; he pressed back; and, in the end, “Masscult and Midcult” appeared, in 1960, in Partisan Review.
Macdonald’s defensiveness about The New Yorker has a back-story. The very first piece he wrote for Partisan Review, in 1937, was an attack on the magazine, and what he called its “Park Avenue attitude toward the arts.” He analyzed The New Yorker’s typical humor, in which characters resembling the magazine’s readers are perpetually flummoxed by the complexities of modern life, as a revelation of the ruling class’s loss of confidence. (It was, arguably, a revelation of the opposite.) By the 1950s, though, he had drunk the waters at Forty-third Street, and he believed completely in the official thesis of Ross’s and Shawn’s New Yorker, which was the absolute separation of the business side from the editorial side of the magazine. The New Yorker published what its writers and editors wanted to publish. It was blind to the marketplace.
So when, in 1965, Tom Wolfe and Clay Felker came out with their drive-by attack on The New Yorker, in the form of a largely fictional “profile” of Shawn, Macdonald was outraged. The attack appeared in the Sunday magazine section of the New York Herald Tribune, which Felker edited, and which was a publication widely and with justice suspected of being on its financial last legs. Wolfe was a staff writer, along with Jimmy Breslin and Dick Schaap. With not much to lose, Wolfe and Felker looked around for a sacred cow they might goad to some sort of amusingly antic reaction. They found a big one.
Wolfe’s two pieces, “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead” and “Lost in the Whichy Thicket: The New Yorker,” were mostly, as he later cheerfully admitted, “sheer rhetorical showboating.” But the cow reacted. Shawn heard about the pieces before they were published, and he made the mistake of sending a letter to the publisher of the Herald Tribune, John Hay Whitney, demanding that they be suppressed. It was catnip to a very desperate tiger. Felker made the letter public, and the pieces got more attention than he or Wolfe likely ever dreamed they would. (The Herald Tribune did fold soon after, but Felker went on to become the founding editor of New York magazine.)
Macdonald’s response to Wolfe’s pieces, itself a two-parter, though a good deal longer, appeared in The New York Review of Books, then in its third year of publication. Considered as a journalistic enterprise with serious intent, Wolfe’s New Yorker hit jobs were easy enough to discredit. He had made up or slanted most of the facts in the pieces. But Macdonald also attacked Wolfe’s style of journalism generally, recently collected in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and coined the term “parajournalism” (derived from parody) to describe them. That term did not catch on. Wolfe’s term, the New Journalism, did.
It was a case of overkill. Wolfe had clearly got under Macdonald’s skin, and there are a couple of possible reasons. The first was Wolfe’s strident, though always cleverly ambiguous, claims for the attractions of,