Prefixes pose a problem for the lexicographer. An anti or an un can be attached to countless words. The question becomes how many should be acknowledged. Gove erred on the side of non-recognition when it came to anti—the meanings of many anti- words being self-evident once you knew the rest of the word—but more accommodating of un. So while many words from un-american to unworldly received separate entries, Gove and his editors showed little interest in two defining terms of American politics: anticommunism and anti-anticommunism.
An anticommunist was anyone from Senator Joseph McCarthy to Whittaker Chambers to Sidney Hook to Dwight Macdonald who defined their politics in opposition to the Soviet Union and its doctrines. An anti-anticommunist was one who defined his or her politics in opposition to anticommunists. They were anti the antis—just the kind of regressive messiness a lexicographer would prefer to avoid. Nor would Gove’s editors take note of two other coinages that increasingly preoccupied Dwight Macdonald: masscult and midcult.
In 1954, Macdonald separated from his wife, Nancy, then flew to Alabama to expedite a divorce. This brought an end to his increasingly faithless commitments to her and to radical politics. Already, Geoffrey Hellman, whom after a couple of drinks he used to call a Tory, had helped him get a job at the New Yorker.1
Such changes didn’t stop Macdonald from criticizing the New Yorker in an essay he wrote for the Ford Foundation, not to be confused with an essay he wrote criticizing the Ford Foundation in the New Yorker.2 Dwight was still Dwight. One day he was flattering his boss, William Shawn, with an almost teary fan letter, its humble words shivering with gratitude for taking him in and treating him so well. Other days Mr. Shawn, like Henry Luce before him, received from his prickly writer point-by-point denunciations of articles by other writers he had been wrong to publish.3
But he was productive. Now in his fifties, Macdonald transformed himself into a critic at large, a funny, smart decrier of the cultural decline he believed to be rampant in America. One could see it in Fannie Hurst novels, rock ’n’ roll music, automotive design, Life magazine, Norman Rockwell illustrations, pulp mystery novels, Hollywood films, and television comedies. Macdonald specialized in authors and works that enjoyed some claim to being highbrow but, in his view, fell short of their own standards. The heartless mockery he’d once rained down on Henry Wallace found new targets in the overly prosaic Revised Standard Version of the King James Bible and the pompous Great Books Club, both of which the former “revolutionist” attacked in the name of tradition.4
Macdonald had never cared much for religion, but in reviewing the RSV he was distraught that “my cup runneth over” had been retranslated as “my cup overflows.” The Elizabethan cadences of the King James Version had been rewritten, as the translators put it, in “language direct and clear and meaningful to people today.” The new language, Macdonald said, was “also flat, insipid, and mediocre.” Poetic Latinate verses had been toned down, while homelier, direct passages had been poeticized. “If they tone down some strings, they tone up others, adjusting them all to produce a dead monotone.”
Mr. Shawn loved the article, as did many readers. Macdonald’s essay on the Great Books Club was another hit. Published by Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.—itself a symbol of decline in Macdonald’s eyes, as the once-admired British institution was now owned by former U.S. senator William Benton (a true vulgarian in Macdonald’s estimation) and the University of Chicago—the Great Books were to Macdonald’s eye a more ponderous and commercially compromised version of the Harvard Classics. Edited by Mortimer J. Adler, author of How to Read a Book, whom Macdonald had previously counted as one of the greater philistines around, and Dr. Robert Hutchins, former chancellor of the University of Chicago, the series seemed utterly fatuous to Macdonald, especially as it pretended to extend the shelf lives of classic titles that were still in print.
Macdonald gleefully aired the unintentionally comic boasts of the Great Books’ champions. Clifton Fadiman, an establishment literary critic who served with Henry Seidel Canby on the Book-of-the-Month Club jury, had compared the Great Books subscribers to the monks of early Christendom whose dedication had preserved great remnants of Western civilization through the Dark Ages. Hutchins had called the set “a liberal education” for Americans, on which depended “the fate of our country, and hence of the world.” Nothing, however, drew Macdonald’s withering attention more than Adler’s Syntopicon, which took up two volumes and came with the Great Books set. It was a dictionary of ideas that make up the Western literary tradition, each laboriously cross-indexed to allow their tracking from one great author to the next. The Syntopicon smacked of the gratuitously academic, needlessly classifying bureaucratic-mindedness that Macdonald hated.
The set of books was reductionist and antiliterary, according to Macdonald, showing the editors believed “the classics are not works of art but simply quarries to be worked for Ideas.” The news that the Great Books sold poorly until Britannica’s door-to-door salesmen began pushing them on timid housewives who paid through an installment plan confirmed Macdonald’s worst suspicions about the unholy alliance between commerce and culture.
Macdonald was true only to himself. He sounded ever so conservative when he found a kind word for William F. Buckley Jr., whose fearless brief against their alma mater, God and Man at Yale, must have brought back memories, though Macdonald had less sympathy for the new conservative magazine Buckley founded, National Review, and for Buckley’s defense of Senator McCarthy, whom Macdonald had the boldness to call in print a “pathological liar.”
Among the anticommunists, however, of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Macdonald stood out for being insufficiently pro-American. And among the anti-anticommunists, including his new wife, Gloria, an apologetic liberal with no radical background, he seemed a cantankerous red-baiter. A protracted negotiation to work for Encounter magazine, the storied intellectual journal co-edited by the English critic Stephen Spender and the former Commentary hand Irving Kristol, which was secretly being funded by the U.S. State Department, ended without an offer of regular employment. The magazine’s Cold War raison d’être was to promote American ideals in postwar Europe, a mission for which Macdonald, politically undisciplined and never so happy as when he was telling someone off, had always been an odd recruit.5
It nevertheless brought him to London for an extended stay, where he found much to admire. “Today,” he would write, “the best English is written and spoken in London”—an appropriate sentiment for a man who had once said of Henry James, “No writer I can think of at the moment is so blandly, easily, triumphantly sure of his mastery of language.”6
Quintessentially American writing received low marks. Mark Twain he discounted as a folk writer who relied too much on spoken idiomatic English and lacked the will to defy the “terrible American pressure to conform.” Months after Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, Macdonald savagely parodied the author’s “primitive syntax,” calling it the prose equivalent of Jackson Pollock’s “drip and dribble” method, showing also Macdonald’s low opinion of abstract expressionism.7
Now and then, Macdonald tended to his masterpiece, “Masscult and Midcult,” developing ideas he had first broached with “A Theory of Popular Culture” in Politics. It evolved into his most ambitious essay—though never a book in its own right. Despite some flirtation with Jason Epstein at Doubleday about placing it between hard covers, Macdonald remained able to boast that he had never written a book “in cold blood.”8 It was finally published in 1960 in, appropriately enough, Partisan Review.
The essay was a great and varied rant against the American faith in progress, against consumerism, and finally against the elevation of the common man from his feudal preliterate state. It was both—unlikely as this sounds—Marxist and aristocratic. It saw great dialectical forces at work in the unfolding of history, and sniffed disdainfully at the results.
For two centuries, Macdonald argued, since before the Industrial Revolution, culture has been increasingly split between the high and the low. With the rise of the masses came the rise of culture for the masses, or masscult, which “is not just unsuccessful art. It is non-art. It is even anti-art.”
Like kitsch, masscult was “easy to assimilate.” Gone were the idiosyncratic feelings and thoughts of the individual artist. Gone were the standards of great older works of art. “Those who consume masscult might as well be eating ice-cream sodas, while those who fabricate it are no more expressing themselves than are the ‘stylists’ who design the latest atrocity from Detroit.”
Masscult not only corrupted the individual artist, it corrupted the individual. Mass man had mass morality, the morality of “a crowd that will commit atrocities that very few of its members would commit as individuals.” Macdonald cited David Reisman’s pioneering work on the “lonely crowd” but actually reserved some of his harshest comments for sociologists, who accept “statistical majority as the great Reality.” These cynics were the intellectual equivalents of those publishers and Hollywood executives whom Macdonald called the Lords of Masscult. They are “willing to take seriously any idiocy if it is held by many people.”
Masscult was the cultural analog to the very worst movements of the twentieth century. “Nazism and Soviet Communism . . . show us how far things can go in politics, as Masscult does in art.” But masscult was democratic, so democratic it destroyed the ability “to discriminate against or between anything or anybody.” Its rise could be traced to the growth in literacy in the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson’s day, when the number of books published annually suddenly quadrupled. In the dawn of widespread literacy, the prelude to popular education, and the beginning of what historians now call the culture of print, the seeds of our cultural demise were sown.
“Midcult” was masscult with a fig leaf, covering its essential vulgarity by paying homage to high culture and sometimes trading on the discoveries of the avant-garde. Midcult was the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. “Midcult is the Book-of-the-Month Club, which since 1926 has been supplying its members with reading matter of which the best that can be said is that it could be worse.” Midcult was Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder, which compared with Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, was, well, “kitsch,” according to Macdonald.
Today social critics are more likely to talk of middlebrow culture from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s as a triumph. Short stories were published in popular magazines. Novels were regularly deemed major cultural events. Senator Benton soon voiced the objections of many, complaining that television was a vast wasteland, but in the meantime his sales force at Encyclopaedia Britannica established actual book clubs for Great Books subscribers to discuss and argue about Plato and Locke. James Parton’s American Heritage magazine, under the editorship of Bruce Catton, popularized American history.
Not all progress was lost on Macdonald. He mentioned that since World War II a great number of classic works and scholarly books had come out in paperback. And the number of American symphony orchestras had doubled in the last decade, while art house movie theaters had grown exponentially. Postwar affluence was also underwriting new support for artists and scholars, some of which Macdonald had enjoyed: grants, prizes, lecture fees, junkets, fellowships, and teaching gigs. But the sale and institutionalization of culture was part of the problem.
“We have, in short, become skilled at consuming High Culture when it has been stamped ‘prime quality’ by the proper authorities, but we lack the kind of sophisticated audience that supported the achievements of the classic avant-garde, an audience that can appreciate and discriminate on its own.”9 But such an audience, familiar with the great tradition while suspicious of its resellers, and able to discriminate the good from the bad (and the great from the merely good) in the newest art and literature, could, of course, only be very small even in the best of times. One might even describe it as an audience of one, resembling no person so much as Dwight Macdonald, or perhaps not even him. While speaking solemnly of the avant-garde, he disliked Pollock and preferred his modernism several decades old, from Rimbaud to Picasso and James Joyce, all of whom he mentions in the essay along with T. S. Eliot, whose poetry, to his own later embarrassment, Dwight Macdonald had once discounted.10