Politics (journal) - Culture, High, Middlebrow and Mass

Culture, High, Middlebrow and Mass

As the 2011 reissue by New York Review Books Classics of his signature 1950s cultural essays, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain (most originally gathered in 1962 as Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture), may indicate, the phase of the career of Dwight Macdonald best known to the educated public came with his arrival in 1952 as critic on the staff of The New Yorker, there to assay with dialectical scalpel at the ready such characteristic products of postwar aspirational "middlebrow" - or "Midcult" to Macdonald - culture as the Great Books of the Western World book-sets, the Revised Standard Version translation of the Bible, the latter-day age-of-science penchant for facts over interpretative general ideas, and that hardiest of evergreens in the groves of the American book market, the how-to book. It was in Politics, though, if not surprisingly, that Macdonald provided himself with a premonitory sounding board for such preoccupations, in and out of his regular roundup "Popular Culture", one of whose items also hints at Macdonald's dawn-to-decadence penchant for connecting the evolution of cultural forms to that of the stages of industrial development from which they issue:

Whatever Became of Addison Sims?

The kind of question it might be fruitful to answer is: why was self-education so much more popular several generations ago than it seems to be now? Pelmanism, Chatauqua, the Harvard Classics ('Fifteen Minutes a Day'), the International Correspondence Schools, the Roth Memory Course ('Why of course I remember you--Mr. Addison Sims of Seattle!'), Cooper Union--these have become innocent archaisms. At the turn of the century, book agents roamed the country ringing doorbells and selling sets of 'standard authors' (Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot) encyclopedias and multi-volume historical works. The book-agent has vanished; people read for amusement, not instruction, and authors are no longer 'standard' or sold in sets. Does all this perhaps show the growth of a popular instinct that education is not the golden key to progress which the Victorians thought it was? Is the myth of the self-made man fading? Is the modern world at once so irrational and so totally organized that the mass-man simply gives up, no longer hoping to understand or 'improve' his situation?

A study of self-education in the last fifty years might be a good way to answer such questions--as Orwell in his 'Ethics of the Detective Story' (POLITICS, November 1944) was able to trace in that field the deterioration of ethical standards during the same period. I can't help feeling that American critics might more profitably concern themselves with such rich and relatively unexplored areas than with trying to find something new to say about Henry James."