Dwight MacDonald was a literary critic who flourished in the Fifties and he published in Partisan Review an article and then a book called “MassCult and MidCult” which I realized has deeply lasted with me ever since I read it just a few years after it was written, His contention that there were three mentalities about literature even if the term “mentality” had not yet come into vogue. MacDonald said that there was low brow culture, which included Charlie Chaplin and Betty Boop, filled with farce and sentimentality, which everyone found accessible; high grade culture, such as Mann and Joyce, which was difficult to master but profound, and so read by only an elite who were given to rarified perceptions and experiences and meanings; and the worst of the three, middle brow literature, which had the appearance of profundity but was merely melodramatic and cheap in their effects but could cause people to think the works profound, and so were the consumers of middle educated people out to traffic with what they considered literature but was of insufficient quality and so a fake. Such poettasters included Norman Rockwell and John O’Hara and Pearl Buck, their works noted for either cynicism or gloom or, in Rockwell or Saroyan or Wilder, cheeriness that is fake because it is so dedicated to the cliche, just the opposite of art, which expanded and challenged sensibility rather than confirming what already was experienced as such.
A good example of such middle brow literature was, I think, Somerset Maugham’s “In Human Bondage”, which everyone I knew read in high school, one young woman filling an index card with notes about any book she had read, both its plots and its meanings, and collecting them in a file cabinet, I impressed at her industriousness though I thought, thank you, I could remember the books I read and what I thought of them. “Of Human Bondage”, I remember, was a book about a young man with a clubfoot who, perhaps for that reason, gets smitten with a woman of lower class background who makes him miserable until he frees himself of her and settles down with a good girl and becomes a doctor. It was a book about how sad and tragic a love affair could be and how a young man could get hooked if he were not careful. This was a very romantic idyll, going back, I later learned, to Goethe and before. What I was aware of even at the time the shortcomings of the novel. The end was very pat, what with some mouthings about how life is like the threads of a rug that get raveled and unraveled and is a great mystery, or what was it that made Mildred seem so attractive, although I got that later on when I saw the movie version with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis as the principles, she always mysterious and alluring even when she played horrid or eccentric people. What got me was to beware of dangerous women. I didn’t see why women would like it at all. It was too partisan and aside from that overly predictable and limited a take however serious it pretended to be. I would rise above the middle brow.
MacDonald was therefore, like many of the “Partisan Review” crowd, not just discovering a fact about life so that it could be treated as another proposition to add to what might be called the sociology of culture, some truths better buttressed by evidence and theoretical clarity than others, sort of what Talcott Parsons was doing at the time when he identified the dynamics and necessities of all social systems .Rather, what a Partisan Review essay did was to unfold a moment of time when an insight could make itself voiced, the new idea ready to be born because that is how consciousness worked, history revealing itself as an object and sets of objects. When the Partisan Review crowd referred to the global “we” as encompassing what all thoughtful people thought, they were not being arrogant in thinking that what they thought had to apply to everyone but that the culture had bubbled up so that everyone could now see what had transpired. Leslie Fiedler, another Partisan Review literary critic fanous for having an essay “Get Back on the Raft, Hon”, which dealt with the homosexual implications of “Huckleberry Finn”, and which I thought at the time was overmuch, also wrote at about that time abot Ethel Rosenberg, trying to imagine how her psyche worked and decided that she had dedicated herself to being a stereotype of herself as the dutiful and martyred Communist, without revealing any personal feelings of anger or other discrepant emotion, and did so to her dying moments, them chronicled to the last moments when the tabloids told of how her hair truned blue and purple when she was electrocuted. Fiedler’s was a way to reveal something about the nature of Ethel Rosenberg, something that arose out of her mentality and which Hannah Arendt, in her own philosophical rather than literary way was coming to call “totalitarian”, which was clever but not as close to the flavor of it as Fiedler accomplished.
MacDonald seemed to me as up to something as a way to criticize mid century culture, what with its assuredness that everything in Eisenhower America was getting better and better, what with the movement to the suburbs and widespread higher education and prosperity and what the magazines called “togetherness”, a vaguely defined experience of how people were knitted together in social life. My own sense and of those coming into being of an adult age was a critique of hat. There was a malaise in social life that consisted of rampant conformity combined with the idea that J. D. Salinger noted that people were “phony”, by which he meant that people engaged in a lot of pretense, what a decade later would be called “presentation”, and so less honest and deep feelings about the actual human and social condition. Not me and my friends, however, to be rebels without a cause.The causes for civil rights and against McCarthyism were already there.Rather, it was to peel off the skin of life and see its Absurdist core.Middle brow culture seemed to capture the malign effects of social life just as a generation later Susan Sontag tried to capture an enlivening outre culture by calling it camp, which soon enough came to mean homosexual .From literature would be found social structure, new forms of social life drawn from new kinds of experience..
And not just that. Another idea about the three forms of culture was that social class might arise out of the different sensibilities rather than the other way round, which was the Marxist view, then extant, that culture was the superstructure that developed from the way the social structure, with its division of labor and means of production, presented itself to the world. Social structure was real and culture an epiphenomenon, something to entertain at the back of the newspaper and magazine rather than on the front page, given to politics and economics and wars. Rather than that, there were the three different points of view, deeply ingrained in the psyche and making three classes of psyches, and expressing themselves in the kinds of vocations to which they might find themselves. Working class people propagated for the most part other working class people, given as they were to cliches and ordinary routine work, while professional people engaged in a kind of adventure even if they never left their hospitals and office practices. How did you get from being one kind of person to another? Education did it, transforming the spirit, the kind of person you were, so as not to be a cog in the engine of industry but a free thinker who has understanding and therefore some control over the social world. People from the farm become drudge workers in industry not just because the workers are made to do so by those who control the industry and because the worker are forced to take the work that they can take but also because those who design the factory figure out what the workers can manage to learn how to do and that means routine work, not people to constantly redesign the machine routine as seems feasible. Consciousness and structure are woven together.
There are lots of things wrong with MacDonald’s formulation. Quite aside from the deep structure I find in it, consider just the literary aspects. Chaplin and the Road Runner cartoons could not be dismissed as low brow entertainment, to be dismissed by Marxists as another way to lull the masses, like religion, so as to distract them from their own miseries, but were themselves high art and discovered as such just a decade later when literary critics discovered popular culture and especially film, finding their skills easily applied to that body of culture and not just novels and poetry. That took a mental adjustment, however minor it might seem in retrospect. A person was brave to take Ingmar Bergman seriously. Moreover, high brow literature was misunderstood if it left out its comic and even farcical aspects. Joyce covers the humor of the quotidian even as Kafka does, when a doctor’s bedside manner also includes getting into bed with a patient. What was soon realized was that MacDonald was continuing with the Modernist idea, that Modernism was necessarily esoteric and therefore inaccessible, when in fact Abstract Expressionism was very simple and direct in its display of patches of color and was prevented from being appreciated because cultural minds were cluttered with the perception that art had to be representational and non-distortive, and so a Modigliani was strange because it was not that. Nabakov’s “Lolita” was both popular and elite art and was stressful for that reason. How should you take it: as an offense or a romp or as deadly serious? How to take Humbert as a villain? It is still a puzzle.
But there is an even deeper problem with MacDonald. Horror of horrors, I came to like the middle brow as a meaningful and accurate account of how life is and approachable as a form of art. It wasn’t just that I wrestled against Talcott Parsons until I realized that his mutually supporting sectors of social life were so and rendered the social world a kind of togetherness, however much he failed to deal with the extent to which “unintended consequences'', the idea of Robert Merton, upset the applecart of social harmony, but in literature as well. I came to reunderstand Shakespeare as presenting his great villains as tortured rather than doomed and so the products of a melodramatic imagination, full of exaggeration and fustian and so of great fun, the villains to be hissed. I liked the well made plays of Lillian Hellman where plots were straightforward and where the characters explained themselves, except not in “The Children’s Hour”, where the elephant in the room was that maybe the two girls were indeed lesbians. Never mind Hellmamn’s Stalinism. She accurately caught people as being what they seemed to be and saying what they meant, which is true enough, very few people either inclined or able to dissemble.
Here is the most telling test case. I think John Updike the best novelist of the last part of the Twentieth Century and a bit later, but the critics are much more reserved, dismissing him as a New Yorker writer or someone who never wrote a great book, though I thought “Couples” and “In The Beauty of the Lilies” and some others qualified. What I think the critics were getting at was that Updike was a middle brow author. His themes and insights were about serious matters, like sex, God and art, but he had rather conventional points of view, treating sex as both serious and silly, God as paradoxical, and art sublime, while Doestoevsky and Joyce dug into these matters more deeply, even if to little effect. Updike was stylish but not mannered, as in Faulkner and Hemingway. His conclusions are pat, as if a way out of terrorism was to get the protagonist of “The Terrorist” to give up his fiendish plan-- though maybe, indeed, the way out of the twenty years of terrorism, now over, was to outlast the fad or taste for that inclination. Updike was so much in the world, so en courant, that such a texture could not be recognized within the confines of the high art of Modernism, what with its appeal to eternal myths and processes.
Of course, I may be making excuses, making literary judgments based on prior and deeper tastes than those found and offered when I studied literature. After all, I was a poor boy who read Herman Wouk as well as “Of Human Bondage” before going on to serious literature and maybe that middle brow intelligence stuck with me regardless of my loftier reading. As MacDonald might say, tastes don’t change even if occupations and other measures of social class do. You can’t take this boy out of the Bronx, even though a lot of others managed it. That is a paradox of literature. You find in it what you are prepared to find and not just the explosive and revolutionary ideas and feelings that you encounter, many a book for the very first time. Literature is a tug of war between what you are and what you can be, both within a novel and in real life, a thought that Updike would also appreciate.