Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [7]
What really disgusted Macdonald, though, was Wolfe’s letter to the editor of The New York Review in reply to Macdonald’s articles. “I like your Tom Wolfe issues the best,” Wolfe wrote. “I hereby charge and assert that the testy but lovable Boswell who annotates my old laundry slips, Dwight Macdonald, drinks tea. Please print this letter up front in your paper so that he can respond at length and write another Tom Wolfe issue.” “I take this persiflage to be a flag of surrender,” Macdonald replied, “but hadn’t expected the flag to be so white. A depressing victory.” That was not the way intellectual battles had been fought in the old days. Or maybe it was that the undergraduate popinjay who talked back to the dean had now gotten old and established, had become rather deanlike himself. The Herald Tribune pieces were sophomoric enough, but they were predicated firmly on the cardinal premise of all journalism, which is that a cat may look at a king. Macdonald had once been such a cat.
Against the American Grain was well reviewed, and it was, to that point, the most commercially successful of Macdonald’s books (which included his peerless anthology, Parodies, published, by the Modern Library, in 1960). But 1962 was virtually the last year when a spirited defense of traditional cultural values by a liberal thinker could have had much credibility. The whole high-low paradigm, so rigorously constructed and maintained by the critics of Macdonald’s generation, was about to end up in the dustbin of history (to borrow a Trotskyism). An educated cultural consumer in the immediate postwar period could understandably conclude that there was not much in the world of popular entertainment that demanded serious attention. Hollywood production was in the doldrums; the broadcast networks were locked into a policy of lowest-common-denominator programming, for fear of offending anyone and losing their oligopoly; the pop music industry was plagued by racism and scandal. And there was a major middle-class culture of earnest aspiration in the 1950s, the product of a strange alliance of the democratic (culture for everyone) and the elitist (culture can make you better than other people). Macdonald understood how this culture was contrived and which buttons of vanity and insecurity it pushed so successfully; and he had no inhibitions about blowing it out of the water—a free-spirited attitude that gave his readers pleasure as well as a sense of self-justification.
Just up ahead, though, a different dispensation was poised to come into being. This was a culture of sophisticated entertainment that was neither avant-garde nor mass, that was commercial but had a bit of a brow. This was the moment of Sgt. Pepper’s and Bonnie and Clyde, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and All in the Family, Motown and Blonde on Blonde, Portnoy’s Complaint and Hair, Andy Warhol and Rolling Stone. The old hierarchical schemes didn’t work on this stuff, and there emerged a fresh critical mode, articulated by critics like Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael, that was specifically designed to engage with it, to evaluate it, and to make it interesting to educated people. A great river of pop, camp, soulful, performative, outrageous, over-the-top cultural products flooded the scene, and Macdonald’s system of cultural judgment was left stranded on the far shore. Today, people still use words like “middlebrow” and “kitsch,” and use them as terms of disapprobation. But few people think that there are whole strata of cultural products that are, a priori, unworthy of interest, or that, in the matter of what kind of art people enjoy or admire, the fate of the republic is somehow at stake.
Macdonald, though, was not in the business of discouraging people