Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [77]
[2]“The passages having to do with physical love have a surprising lyric power.”—Jessamyn West in the New York Herald Tribune.
[3]“cakewalk—a form of entertainment among American Negroes in which a prize of a cake was given for the most accomplished steps and figures.”—webster.
[4]As: “Thinking last night of Ralph’s ‘Joanie,’ those Moores, all unsuspecting; whose ‘shame’ or ‘disgrace’ of the same kind (if more decent in degree) stood accomplished, waiting merely to be discovered to them, Arthur Winner had felt able to pre-figure, following the first horrified anger, the distraught recriminations, the general fury of family woe, a bitter necessary acceptance.” I find such prose almost impossible to read, partly because of an inexpressive, clumsy use of words, partly because the thought is both abstract and unclear, but chiefly because the rhythms are all wrong. Instead of carrying one forward, they drop one flat, and one must begin anew with each phrase. An artist creates a world, bit added to bit; each addition of Cozens destroys what has gone before.
[5]Author’s Note, as of 1962: “Virgin knot untied” is an echo of Shakespeare who, in Act. IV, Scene 3 of Pericles has Marina say: “If fires be hot, knives sharp, or waters deep / Untied I still my virgin knot will keep. / Diana, aid my purpose!” This gloss I owe to Mr. Cozzens, to whom I sent a copy of my review. He wrote me he had become bored by the unanimous critical praise for By Love Possessed and found my “novel pronouncements” an interesting change; however, he went on, he couldn’t take me seriously as a judge of style since I preferred Hemingway and Faulkner to W. Somerset Maugham. The riposte on “virgin knot untied” was the only solid point he made and I must admit it troubled me. Taking on Cozzens was one thing, but Shakespeare? Daunted but still hopeful, I wrote to the only Shakespearean scholar I knew, John Berryman, who replied: “Pericles is not in the folio, only substantive text is the lousy Quarto of 1609; moreover Sh only wrote the last three acts. But he did write this line, I think, just as it stands. He sometimes got fouled up in negatives and said the exact opposite of what he meant; I have a collection of these passages among my papers at Princeton....There are several in Macbeth. However, he didn’t mean ‘tied,’ he meant ‘untied.’ This is the first alternative and the one I call right; it is upheld by one of the two chief authorities on Sh’s language, Alexander Schmidt, who says ‘The negative form producing an incorrectness of expression...i.e., not untied, not loosed’ (Sh-Lexicon 1886). Second possibility is that the line is corrupt—‘untried’ immediately occurs to one.” (It hadn’t occurred to me, or to Mr. Cozzens, either immediately or postmediately.) I sent this explication on to Mr. Cozzens, apologizing for having blamed him for a slip that was actually Shakespeare’s fault but there was no reply.
[6]Brooks and MacLeish assumed it was good for writers to identify themselves with their society, which in turn assumed the society was good. If it wasn’t, then the avant-garde was justified in isolating itself. Empirically, this would seem to be the case—at least most of the memorable art in every field produced between about 1890 and 1930 was done by artists like Joyce, Eliot, Picasso, Stravinsky, and others who had rejected bourgeois society. But there’s no space to argue the question here. Those interested might look at my “Kulturbolshewismus—the Brooks-MacLeish Thesis” in Partisan Review, November-December 1941, reprinted in Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1957).
The Book-of-the-Millennium Club
For $249.50, which is (for all practical purposes) $250, one could buy, in 1952, a hundred pounds of Great Books: four hundred and forty-three works by seventy-six authors, ranging chronologically and in other ways from Homer to Dr. Mortimer J. Adler, the whole forming a mass amounting to thirty-two thousand pages, mostly double-column, containing twenty-five