Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain

by Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the A (Editor), Louis Menand (Introduction)

A New York Review Books Original

An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free.

This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler , reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Politics, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Sociology

289 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Dwight Macdonald (March 24, 1906 – December 19, 1982) was an American writer, editor, film critic, social critic, philosopher, and political radical. Macdonald was a member of the New York Intellectuals and editor of their leftist magazine Partisan Review for six years. He also contributed to other New York publications including Time, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and politics, a journal which he founded in 1944.

Reviews

[Kathrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where have all the curmudgeons gone? Why are modern critics so afraid of telling it as they see it? Maybe because criticism has been bought by midcult postmodernism, just like everything else for sale today (and it's all for sale). In fifty years Macdonald won't even be readable; a few of his essays are there already (Parajournalism). But that's what happens when a a critic of high cult sensibilities chooses to negatively critique the offerings of his culturally specific (by definition) midcult peers.
His title essay, as well as The Triumph of the Fact, still ring through with remarkable clarity, and there are books to be written to fill in the gaps of the past few decades. Louis Menand may be doing it, as well as Susan Jacoby. But I don't think they're assholes, and Macdonald clearly is. But he's an asshole because he's angry, and that anger is worth listening to. We don't like our critics to be assholes; it offends our democratic sensibilities, but in exchange we compromise the truth, or fear of ever grappling with it at all. And what does Macdonald say about compromise?
"Compromise is the essence of midcult, and compromise is fatal to excellence in such matters." (Norman Cousins's Flat World)

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was concerned Macdonald's stance would be so elitist it would feel very dated. But the essay for which he's most famous, Masscult and Midcult, is actually very readable still, and I found myself agreeing with a lot of it. The book's title is somewhat misleading - "the effects of mass culture" aren't really the topic here, as Macdonald mostly (fortunately) ignores television and music. These are essays about books.

Along with Masscult and Midcult, the best essays here are on Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and a long-forgotten novelist, James Gould Cozzens, and his bestselling 1957 book By Love Possessed. Although there seems to be little point in brushing up on one's Cozzens expertise, the essay is relevant because Macdonald tries to explain how such a terrible novel (absolutely unreadable, judging by the excerpts he provides) got so many rave reviews even from some fairly respected and learned critics. It's actually very easy to see the same thing happening today.

The quality of the essays seemed to fall off toward the end of the book, or perhaps they just didn't age well, and I skimmed the ones on Amateur Journalism, "Howtoism" (about how-to books), and America's love of facts.

This excerpt from the Hemingway essay seems spot-on to me, and gives an idea of what I consider Macdonald's best writing:

[Hemingway's] one talent was aesthetic - a feeling for style, in his writing and his life, that was remarkably sure. But the limits of aestheticism unsupported by thought or feeling are severe. Hemingway made one big, original stylistic discovery - with the aid of Gertrude Stein - but when he had gotten everything there was to be gotten out of it (and a bit more) he was unable...to invent anything else...

Hemingway's opposites are Stendhal and Tolstoy - interesting he should feel especially awed by them - who had no style at all, no effects. Stendhal wrote the way a police sergeant would write if police sergeants had imagination - a dry, matter-of-fact style. Tolstoy's writing is clear and colorless, interposing no barrier between the reader and the narrative, the kind of direct prose, businesslike and yet Olympian, that one imagines the Recording Angel uses for entries in his police blotter. There is no need for change or innovation with such styles. But the more striking and original a style is, the greater such necessity. Protean innovators like Joyce and Picasso invent, exploit, and abandon dozens of styles; Hemingway had only one. It was not enough.

[alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

pure acid. I'll probably add more thoughts to this later but Macdonald is a joy to read. An oasis in a world polluted by positivity

[Andrew]

Dwight Macdonald, while he's largely been passed over now, was one of the most divisive cultural critics of the postwar era. Today, people like Evgeny Morozov and Thomas Frank continue his particular brand of grumpy, deliberate, fly-in-the-ointment criticism, and their fans will definitely find something to like here.

These days, Macdonald's criticism of "Midcult"-- dreck dressed up in vaguely "cultural" trappings (see most Pulitzer-winning novels, both now and in Macdonald's time, or Hollywood's yearly attempt at "serious" film during Oscar season) remains as prescient as ever. And his narration of Hemingway's life and literary failures in Hemingwayish prose-- brainblow included-- is as stinging as ever. But some of the essays have aged terribly. Few people remember who James Gould Cozzens or Norman Cousins are (although as far as I can tell, they are mediocrities on the order of Khaled Hosseini and Thomas Friedman), and even fewer would care enough to read a takedown of their work, however clever. Perhaps most importantly, the cultural landscape has changed so much since the '60s that a lot of Macdonald's criticisms need serious revision to be relevant.

[Sebastian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I went to a book talk to see Louis Menard, the writer of this book's introduction (which is largely the same as his New Yorker piece that drew my interest in the first place) and John Summers, the book's editor, and was interested in their shared views on the declining relevance of MacDonald's core critiques in today's world. I'm, however, not so certain we're all that far past concerns about profit over quality or obligation over merit when it comes to the types of art and culture we consume. (Speaking of, that very verb is a problematic, and very 21st century, term that captures a sliver of these issues.)

Sure, we've seemingly merged two worlds, high and low brow through, among other things, postmodernism and the increasing access technology gives most of us to a broader spectrum of arts and true, we no longer fear declining cultural literacy as the leading edge of the end of our way of life (or worse still the beginning of the slippery slope towards totalitarianism). After all, the trope of "TV as the new novel" seems pretty well accepted amongst even what is left of the chattering class.

Nevertheless, there is absolutely a continuing vitality to the need for resistance to, and indeed attacks upon, the vulgarization and commoditization of culture and art. Snobbery (which, arguably, at its best could be better described as strong-minded, well-informed and vocal discernment) may have never been less popular, but passionate and reasoned dissent from the tidal wave of common sentiment (even if sometimes it's cheekily contrarian for its own sake) will always have a place on my bookshelf. I think reading this book and Adorno in a cycle for a couple of months would make me despair (even more) of the state of culture today, and perhaps expose me as hopelessly outmoded, but damn if I don't at times long for these sort of well constructed, poison-penned cultural assessments. These writers are not, and should never be, ultimate cultural arbiters (any more than the false cultural beacons they skewered), but revealing takedowns of hard things made easy (a phrase that might be both an oversimplification of midcult and a shorthand description of the internet age) are more important now today than ever.

All that said, MacDonald is far from perfect, as even one who has sought out venom begins after a while to tire of relentless negativity when critiques morph into somewhat overdone rants. Moreover, there are sticky and potentially quite regressive implications as to issues of privilege and class embedded in some of his big ideas that ought not be as glossed over as I have here. For a much more complex and complete view of the book and the man, the Salon article linked in another review above is highly recommended.

[haetmonger · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Life is a typical homogenized magazine, appearing on the mahogany library tables of the rich, the glass cocktail tables of the middle class, and the oilcloth kitchen tables of the poor. Its contents are as thoroughly homogenized as its circulation. The same issue will present a serious exposition of atomic energy followed by a disquisition on Rita Hayworth's love life; photos of starving children picking garbage in Calcutta and of sleek models wearing adhesive brassieres; an editorial hailing Bertrand Russell's eightieth birthday (A GREAT MIND IS STILL ANNOYING AND ADORNING OUR AGE) across from a full-page photo of a matron arguing with a baseball umpire (MOM GETS THUMB); nine color pages of Renoir paintings followed by a picture of a roller-skating horse [...] Somehow these scramblings together seem to work all one way, degrading the serious rather than elevating the frivolous. Defenders of our Masscult society society [...] see phenomena like Life as inspiriting attempts at popular education—just think, nine pages of Renoirs! But that roller-skating horse comes along, and the final impression was that both Renoir and the horse were talented."

[John David · Rating 5 out of 5]

If literary criticism is an art, then any value it has is in the uncompromising stances it takes and the eloquence the critic can muster in defending them. Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982), contributor to The New Yorker and the Partisan Review, certainly had some convictions that belong to another decade. Most famously, his opinions on aesthetic judgment, anti-commercialism, and his deep suspicion of cultural standardization – all of which are worked together seamlessly into an organic whole in the title essay of this collection - can strike today’s reader as strident and elitist. But he belonged to an age now nearly gone when critics could take on a piece of art armed only with their adoration or ire and all the polemic they could muster. This combined with the University of Chicago Press’s recent release of “Atrocities of the Mind: Essays on Violence and Politics in the American Century” (2026) made me want to revisit his writing.

This 2011 NYRB release contains a brief, helpful introduction by Louis Menand and ten of Macdonald’s essays, covering everything from the long-forgotten novelist James Gould Cozzens to the Great Books enterprise perpetrated by Mortimer Adler to the data-obsessed neopositivism that insists on collapsing understanding into “fact.” The first essay, which acts as the collection’s organizing center, takes up one-quarter of the book and is devoted to the only piece of writing Macdonald is widely remembered for today: “Masscult and Midcult.” It is nothing less than an outline of an entire sociological theory of art, detailing the disappearance of folk culture, the rise of mass society, and the gradual appearance of a suspicious new kind of art he calls midcult (short for “mid-culture”.)

Sometime around the Industrial Revolution, the well-worn distinction between “high-brow” and “low-brow” took form, with high-brow indicating art that calls upon individual judgment and the participation of the viewer while low-brow is commercially manufactured art meant for mass consumption. While “low-brow” may sound crude, he means nothing condescending or demeaning. He understands this kind of art is a vital part of entertainment in a mass society.

What he thinks is much more insidious is the appearance of a third category which tries to bridge the gap between high and low. This is midcult. It imitates the accoutrements of high art but removes the difficulty and analysis which high art demands of its audience. The obvious forms of midcult are aimed at the aspiring sophisticate, persuading readers they are improving themselves while really doing little more than consuming commodified cultural goods. It’s a cynical marketing attempt – and it’s the cynicism that incurs most of Macdonald’s indignation here – that offers intellectual and moral amelioration at a price with all the hard work already done for you.

One of Macdonald’s primary targets? Mortimer Adler’s Great Books project. Coming in at fifty-four volumes (including such essentials as Apollonius of Perga’s “On Conic Sections” and William Gilbert’s “On the Loadstone and the Magnetic Bodies”) crammed into tiny, uncomfortable typeface and selling the consumerist illusion of high culture, Macdonald claims it treats important literature like a household appliance or status symbol. The familiar spectacle of handsome Great Books sets sitting largely unread on home bookshelves almost seems designed to vindicate him. It’s easy to conclude Macdonald’s criticism is for the person who wants to buy the set and learn, but that’s not the case. His hissing contempt is saved for Mortimer Adler himself, who knows that learning doesn’t start on one end of a bookshelf and end on the other, but takes a lifetime. His disdain is not for the person who thinks the set will provide them with all the culture they need, but with the professoriat and marketing team who know better. (Note: Macdonald is talking about the Great Books enterprise itself, not the individual books contained within them.)

The midcult essay establishes the concern reflected in many of the other pieces: not just hostility toward bad art, but of the people and institutions who relieve their audiences of the burden of judgment while promising them its rewards. Distinct in Macdonald’s writing is a yearning for a time when fewer intermediaries stood between artist and audience. But with the rise of professional marketing and advertising in the early twentieth century, making a profit became primary and good art secondary. The result? A set of aesthetic experiences that have been standardized and flattened before they reach their audience.

His criticisms of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible and Webster’s Third International Dictionary are similar. Macdonald’s complaint about the 1952 Bible translation was not its theology, but the tacit assumption that making the Bible easier to read necessarily makes it better. The King James Version, despite its inaccuracies in translation, has become one of the great monuments of English prose, with its bizarre archaisms lending it much of its strange allure. Instead of coming to terms with the language and reveling in the aesthetic experience it provides, Macdonald argues that by updating many of these phrases, its unique rhythm, resonance, and mystery have vanished. In Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, the editors took on a descriptivist approach, prioritizing the way English was spoken instead of pointing out correct and incorrect usage. Macdonald sees this as an abdication of the lexicographers’ job. Both controversies reproduce Macdonald's objection to midcult: difficulty, distinction, and judgment are treated as defects to be engineered away. In each case, an institution charged with transmitting culture instead accommodates itself to the largest possible audience.

There are also more literary essays, including ones on Hemingway, James Agee, and Tom Wolfe’s abominable New Journalism, or as Macdonald sneeringly calls it, “parajournalism.” The standout among these is the piece on Agee, who was Macdonald’s close friend. He thought Agee one of the greatest writers of his generation, but says that his lack of discipline, inability to finish his work, and alcoholism accounted for the dissipation of his extraordinary talent.

When you read Macdonald, don’t do it to agree with him. Do it to cultivate a healthy distrust of cultural consensus. Do it because he thinks criticism is a deeply moral activity. Do it because his contradictions are intellectually productive. Above all, do it because his contrarian, combative prose is a singular education in how criticism can be practiced in a time that has forgotten that enthusiasm without discrimination is merely another form of advertising. I don't want critics to function as authorities who issue final verdicts. I want critics willing to make judgments forcefully enough that you have something worth arguing against.

[Clayton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Too cantankerous for the highbrows, too smart for the middlebrows, too blasphemous for the orthodox, too faithful for the relativists, too left for the bougies, not left enough for the communard-poseurs; Dwight Macdonald had that rare critical nose that can search nominally opposed party platforms and identify the same strains of bullshit. All praise to the NYRB Press for putting Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain back into print.

These are beautiful essays. His tone--precise, erudite, merciless--doesn't really sell much these days, but there are sixty-year-old rhetorical suplexes on The Atlantic or the cult of Hemingway that, disconcertingly, still apply today. Macdonald's treatment of some mega-seller novelist named Cozzens and his awful, awful sentences of Middle Americana fetishism is so vicious, the victim and his reputation seem to have disappeared from the historical record out of sheer embarrassment. And yet, most of these accusations can be hurled at several major American novelists pulling the same con (they're so sincere!) on the reading public today--no need to name names.

Still, some essays are readable more for their time-capsule quality than for addressing any pressing issues today: Macdonald's attack on the Harvard Great Books series quaintly recalls a time when Americans read enough books that it was OK to criticize some of those books instead of celebrating the fact that they read at all. The zany antics of the New Journalists, the pinnacle of creative nonfiction when Macdonald felt compelled to point out that these journalists were literally making shit up, are more of a joke than an example in creative nonfiction today.

And what about Masscult and Midcult, those bogeyman invoked in the titular essay? Many of the specifics have changed dramatically--this stuff tends to have a brief shelf life, thank God--but Midcult (high art modes repackaged for dunces) continues to make a strong showing every year in the Oscars, the Pulitzers, The Atlantic, and god knows how many dreadful novels about sad middle-class American families that are always topping the NYT bestseller list. Masscult, though; oh brother, Masscult. Masscult won. Popular art for mass consumption is the new religion, and it's hard to see poor Macdonald even having the energy to finish writing if we could jump back to 1962 and warn him about Buzzfeed (also Vietnam and Ronald Reagan, but mostly Buzzfeed). We certainly don't have to share his sneering contempt for pop culture--who doesn't like Star Wars?--but for his prescience alone, that makes it essential reading for American cultural history.

[Nicholas During · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book. Despite having an admittedly anti-democratic view of culture, I couldn't help but agree with Macdonald in pretty much all of his opinions (except of course, his very negative views on Rock'n'Roll). I know his work may be a bit out of date--and Louis Menand points out this in his introduction very well--but the concept of Midcult struck me as very pertinent today. Reading the take-down of James Gould Cozzens I couldn't help but think of Jonathan Franzen, will anyone remember him in 50 years? That said, I do see how his refusal to accept mass marketed art is a problem in the days of 'fandom', and I very often considered myself a fan, and I do love genre writing.

But still, Macdonald is a very fluid writer, and is very very funny. We live in a very uncritical age, I think, and it is always good to hear a well-written critic oppose the common forces that have built up so much force by mass fawning. I heavily recommend this book to anyone interested in literature, art, and culture. And you won't be disappointed, it is a very funny book with moments that made me laugh out loud. And the introduction with all of the background details of the political/critical history of the US in the 30s thru 60s was very useful and interesting. I want more.

[Bryan--The Bee’s Knees · Rating 4 out of 5]

This older collection of Macdonald's essays (originally published in 1962) shares half its title with a recent NYRB edition of his work, though they are not exactly the same--NYRB includes eight of the fifteen essays from this title, but adds only two others (and an introduction by Louis Menand.) The lead-off essay in both collections is Masscult and Midcult, Macdonald's description of the two challenges to High Art and Culture that he saw in the 1950s. Masscult, in a nutshell, is entertainment marketed to the masses, and Macdonald is realistic enough to realize that most people are not interested in art or a culture that demands more from them. Most people, he understands, want to come home from work and be diverted for a bit before going to bed and getting up to do it all over again. Thus Mass Culture has it's place, and no one is going to mistake it for what it isn't. Midcult, though, is more pernicious--a mixture of the low and highbrow. The problem is that with Midcult, people don't know that they are getting inferior goods--it's mistaken for genuine high culture. This is because it often takes avant garde techniques and puts them to use in inferior productions. Macdonald's fear is that this leveling will eventually become the new ceiling.

A list of authors that Macdonald would classify as Midcult: John Steinbeck, J. P. Marquand, Pearl Buck, Irwin Shaw, Herman Wouk, John Hersey, as well as the mid 50s version of Harper's Magazine and The Atlantic. You pays your money and you takes your choice. Four Midcult classics that he singles out for extended criticism: The Old Man and the Sea, Our Town, John Brown's Body and J.B.

The essays that follow are linked to the theme, with a section on Twain, Joyce, James Agee and Hemingway titled Heroes/Victims; another on James Gould Cozzens' By Love Possessed, Colin Wilson's The Outsider, and Raymond Williams' The Long Revolution, called Pretenders. Betrayals includes The Great Books, The Revised Standard Version of The Bible, and the Third Edition of Webster's New International Dictionary, as well as an essay on the decline and fall of English usage. The last section, Examinations, covers the journalism in England, "Howtoism", and the American obsession with facts.

If someone were to draw a Venn diagram of all the people who are currently alive who've read both Cozzens' By Love Possessed and Wilson's The Outsider, the intersection would probably be me. I have a pretty good idea that the population would be minimal, at any rate. But my larger point is I can't disagree with anything Macdonald says about them, which helps lend credence to some of his other subjects I'm not as familiar with. The way that these two particular books relate to the Midcult theme is that at the time they were published, they were praised to the heavens by an overwhelming variety of critics--Macdonald speculates on why this was so, but inevitable, it comes down to the fact that when a culture is packaged rather than intrinsic, this is the sort of thing that happens.

Beside the points that Macdonald is trying to make here, he is entertaining in his own right. Almost every essay here had something that made me chuckle, and while he had the reputation of a curmudgeon, his spirited and lively writing kept my interest, even when his targets were nearly self-parodies (His essay Howtoism, about the American obsession with practical 'how-to' guides and self-help books is a little like shooting fish in a barrel, but it's amusing for all that.) His prescriptionist grammar tendencies seem quaint today--language changes so quickly now that things that were objectionable 50 years ago are standard today, but that didn't make his comments any less entertaining. A lot of the enjoyment, though, comes from style and word play--if you enjoy witty writing with a snarky edge, Macdonald may be the essayist you've been looking for.

Some of this seems like preaching to the choir though--thus the four stars. I was reminded a few times while reading Masscult and Midcult of Jacques Barzun's The House of Intellect, with it's mournful examination of the state of our culture, written around the same time as Against the American Grain. Books of this sort can momentarily give me the illusion of being on the inside, as if spotting the problems puts me above them. Thankfully Macdonald leaves off his general criticisms before it wears out, and moves onto his specific subjects. I haven't enjoyed a book of essays as much as this one since reading Joe Queenan's One for the Books. Maybe I just like curmudgeons.

[Matthew Wilder · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I was a kid, my local library—small town Illinois—had a deluxe shelf of film criticism. Not just Rex Reed and Judith Crist but, sure, Kael and Sarris and John Simon, but also William S. Pechter, lots of Stanley Kauffmann, and Dwight MacDonald. Dwight’s ON MOVIES was a big thing for me.

Macdonald was more plainspoken than snobbish (so they said) John Simon but he took a different tack: with his twirly moustache (reprised now by the man bun men of 2024) he was a sort of H.L. Mencken of sixties highbrowism—with maybe a squidge of James Thurber thrown in. I recall MacDonald at length reviewing 8 1/2 and LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, but the only real critical assessment I can recall is Dwight laughing at Shelley Winters as a lame or halt or blind woman screaming “Oi’m cured! Oi’m cured!” in George Stevens’ THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD. Here was the onetime supposed Trotskyite MacDonald now representing Leonard Pinth-Garnell sniffiness! Note to reader: I would much rather, right this very minute, consume the High Mid art MacDonald despises, like Stevens’ GREATEST STORY, than many of the man’s Criterion Closet favorites.

The brand-defining essay in here is, of course, “Masscult and Midcult,” in which MacDonald delineates the products of mass culture (let us say: gossipy movie magazines, or perhaps baseball bubblegum cards) versus “midcult”—things feigning to be something a little higher. The Book of the Month Club—kitschy things like that.

Needless to say, anyone drowning in an age of TikTok and “memes” and wokeish Marvel movies about BIPOC girls becoming STEM-subject geniuses, someone quacking for 10,000 words about the shittiness of the Saturday Review is touchingly quaint in a “You had no idea how good you had it” way.

(In an early, brand-defining James Wolcott essay, he finds Dwight at some “Whither intellectualism?” symposium with Susan Sontag, George Steiner and others, asking his fellow panelists, “Wasn’t there a movie called THE DEER HUNTER?…”)

The two deathless essays in here, for me at least, are on the origins of the King James Bible, and a literary analysis—well, a Sunday Times Book Review style analysis—of two editions of Webster’s Dictionary. Sound dry? MacDonald’s insanely sensuous insistence on the close reading of individual words makes it a one-man thrill kill cult. He reaches out of snarking on his midwit contemporaries and provides a beautifully minute portrait of the construction of a language via its most essential texts.

[Sps · Rating 3 out of 5]

Macdonald was several things, among them:

-Chronicler of the rise of mass culture, with its attendant effects: "The more literature became a branch of industry, the more the craving for the other extreme--individuality. Or rather, a somewhat coarser commodity, Personality." (20)

-Literary critic a la Nabokov, calling out maudlin sentiment, poshlust, and lack of careful attention:
"It is written in that fake-Biblical prose Pearl Buck used in The Good Earth, a style which seems to have a malign fascination for the midbrows--Miss Buck also got a Nobel Prize out of it. There are only two characters, who are not individualized because that would take away from the Universal Significance." (38) (Ha! See also Marianne Robinson, Dostoyevsky, etc.)

-Theorist of midcult, which "has the essential qualities of Masscult--the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity--but it decently covers them with a cultural figleaf." (35) When Midcult tries to play social critic it fails: "A soft impeachment--but Midcult specializes in soft impeachments. Its cakes are forever eaten, forever intact." (49)

-Unknowing predictor of future Internet users' behavior: "If the kind of curiousity that Time exploits is not functional, neither is it exactly 'idle' (which implies a kind of leisurely enjoyment). It is, rather, a nervous habit. As smoking gives us something to do with our hands when we aren't using them, Time gives us something to do with our minds when we aren't thinking."(212)

And there are too many other bons mots to record, e.g. the suggested opening verses of Genesis (p.175-176).

[Roy Kenagy]

NYRB has reissued Masscult and Midcult, along with other MacDonald essays I haven't read. Sounds like a pleasant sip of critical nostalgia. Plus support for my thoughts about how middle-brow taste pretensions are one source of the rot at the core of public library culture.

The Nation: http://bit.ly/ubYqlk

"Macdonald was writing at a time when the culture industry was selling the idea that “Culture Is Good for You!” and, much to his horror, people were buying it. The GI Bill had created a postwar cohort of college-educated Americans looking for cultural edification. The burgeoning middle class sought not just economic mobility but also social mobility, and culture was a form of capital. In his introduction to Masscult and Midcult, Louis Menand describes how the “major middle-class culture of earnest aspiration in the 1950s [was] 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.” It wasn’t the “Masscult” but the “Midcult” that so offended Macdonald. Midcult was what he called “the tepid ooze” of middlebrow culture—neither high nor low, without any depth to redeem it."

[Paul O'Leary · Rating 4 out of 5]

For those who like their politics radical, sort of, and their culture securely highbrow, these essays should make you feel right at home. Whether it's popularizing fun and condescending terms like masscult or middlebrow, or just annoying Trotsky in general, Dwight MacDonald is an urbane, perceptive critic of American culture at a time when it desperately needed him. His essay on Hemingway is deliciously funny, but probably unfair. His essay on Tom Wolfe is less funny, but likely right on the mark-sorry, Tom. His essay on Webster's 2nd & 3rd editions points to the English language issues we have today... Can English be scientifically regulated strictly on the basis of usage without injuring culture? Can culture survive if science refuses incorrection its domain? Who the hell of any culture would use the term 'incorrection' in the first place? What is proper English? Is there such a concept? Should there be? Can it include 'twerking' and retain any dignity at all? The first essay 'Masscult & Midcult' is his most famous and enduring contribution, although this is a strong collection overall.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dwight MacDonald was a pretentious snob, but at least he was funny. The Hemingway takedown parody is genuinely hilarious. It’s fun to read him rip apart stuff he hates — I can definitely see the roots of modern pop culture criticism in many of these essays (especially Ebert). But he also hates stuff for no reason. Like arguing that rock and roll can’t be art. I guess in 1955 this was a reasonable opinion but 10 years later that would prove to be an extremely bad take so it makes some of these essays age very poorly. But even so, he’s clever (and joy does he know it) so despite some of these being like 70 years old, they’re still entertaining.

[Tom van Veenendaal · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am writing this review only to clarify that this collection is based on Dwight Macdonald's original, titled Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (which Goodreads, strangely, has no record of), but is not identical. In a rather baffling move, many of the finest essays in the original collection are left out, while two new ones are added, among them Macdonald's infamous essay on Thomas Wolfe, apparently only to be mocked Louis Menand in his introduction. The results is a far shorter and less interesting book, that leaves out Macdonald's own preface, the far more interesting John Simon introductory essay that accompanied the first reprint, and many of Macdonald's more interesting essays. I would advice grabbing a copy of this collection as it originally appeared -- it won't cost you much anyway.

[Alvaro de Menard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interminable. Macdonald tries really hard to be an elitist, and occasionally even manages to pull it off in a semi charming kind of way. But he's mostly a dull midwit. His criticism on Hemingway, Melville, Wolfe is pure mediocrity.

[Therese]

Dwight was waking up early on weekends to have extra time to hate… much respect to this heavyweight champion hater from my amateur hater armchair

[Joe Olipo · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Say it, not knowing what." — Beckett, The Unnameable

On "Ratcult"

There's a popular saying among physicians, "For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the standard of care." The left-wing partisan treats his comrades the same way, but in the opposite sense — reserving his most excessive punishments for close friends. From the objects of his ire, you can tell Dwight Macdonald is a Fellow Traveler (despite his retrogressive defense of a cultural élite of belles lettres long since passed). For certain people, there's nothing more offensive than frank praise of the mediocre, a feeling enhanced the more such mediocrity happens to resembles oneself. Macdonald's polemic against Hemingway is largely correct: we recognize Hemingway's pared-down prose as a particular, fixed stylization without the necessary endurance for the novel. (Macdonald's criticism of Wolfe, however, is premature. Wolfe not yet having written The Bonfire of the Vanities, which I have (highly) praised as "not useless", though written in the style that Macdonald condemns as "parajournalism".) Hemingway also, famously, had little currency with Nabokov, who placed him in far fewer words as a writer of "books for boys". This succinct phrase suggests that the ferocity of Macdonald's essay, in typical left-wing fashion, may come from a quality they have in common. Perhaps Macdonald chafes so hard against Hemingway because his polemical essays, often strongly worded to excess, are what I would call "literary criticism for boys".

"Mid" is making a comeback as derogatory term, though Dwight Macdonald has little to do with it. (My understanding is the term has something to do with cannabis.) Frankly, the short duration of "midcult" as a term of cultural criticism is a bit surprising, given that MacDonald happens to be writing for perhaps the flagship Middlebrow publication — The New Yorker — and that it has always been cool to be a little against the movement of which one is a part. From reading some reviews on this site, it appears that Macdonald's criticism is still helpful for in-group formation among a certain cadre of literate boys. Perhaps this is analogous to the group formation that happens among tween girls, as Eileen Myles elaborates: "Rats. That’s what we called the people who wouldn’t go to college, who were essentially breeders, not 'Harvs.' Which was us—kids who hung out at Harvard Square, who were cool. Just a few years ago we had all been rats" (Myles, Cool for You). If "Midcult", the effusive praise of the products of consumer culture, is bad because it only apes the movements of a High Brow art it knows nothing about, then this is, in the words of Beckett, "[saying] it, not knowing what". Macdonald may perceive this phenomenon but doesn't appear to appreciate the danger inherent in his polemic against it. In fact, our author, and others like him, are the forebearers of what one might call "Ratcult": the effusive criticism of consumer culture that only apes the movements of a real critique. If "Midcult" is liking something because you saw it on TV, "Ratcult" is disliking something because you read an article about it in The New Yorker. (One might, in fact, extend this to the entire media ecosystem of "hate clicks".) We know Macdonald is outdated because, though we are living in the age of "Ratcult", his Baroque essays never mention anything like it. Certainly, if he ever thought about it, he would execrate it more than anything. "Midcult", for Macdonald, might be the pulp fiction paperback at the end of the hall, but "Ratcult" is sharing a byline in the same magazine. And there's nothing that a "Harv" like Macdonald hates more than a "Rat", even though — and especially because — they were both the same girls last year.

[Richard Jespers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I became interested in this book when I saw it reviewed in The New Yorker.

Some nuggets:

“This is a magazine-reading country. When one comes back from abroad, the two displays of American abundance that dazzle one are the supermarkets and the newsstands. There are no British equivalents of our Midcult magazines like The Atlantic and the Saturday Review, or of our mass magazines like Life and The Saturday Evening Post and Look, or of our betwixt-&-between magazines like Esquire and The New Yorker (which also encroach on the Little Magazine area). There are, however, several big-circulation women’s magazines, I suppose because the women’s magazine is such an ancient and essential form of journalism that even the English dig it” (59).

“The nearest approach to a ‘center of consciousness’ in our magazines is in the Midcult ones like Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Reporter and the Saturday Review, and the trouble with theses is that the editors consistently—one might almost say on principle—underestimate the intelligence of the readers” (62).

“Books that are speculative rather than informative, that present their authors’ own thinking and sensibility without any apparatus of scientific or journalistic research, sell badly in this country. There is a good market of the latest ‘Inside Russia’ reportage, but when Knopf published Czeslaw Milosz’ The Captive Mind, an original and brilliant analysis of the Communist mentality, it sold less than 3,000 copies. We want to know how what who, when, where, everything but why” (208).

“The objection to middlebrow, or petty-bourgeois, culture is that it vitiates serious art and thought by reducing it to a democratic-philistine pabulum, dull and tasteless because it is manufactured for a hypothetical ‘common man’ who is assumed (I think wrongly) to be even dumber than the entrepreneurs who condescendingly ‘give the public what it wants.’ Compromise is the essence of midcult, and compromise is fatal to excellence in such matters” (269).

I was fascinated with this man’s informed opinions because essentially little has changed since he made these statements (when I was but a child or youth). If anything, such conditions have worsened. What can be more Masscult than People Magazine? And has even The New Yorker slipped a bit?

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very nice, and still pertinent, essays by Dwight macdonald about books, book reviewing, and culture, high, low, and midcult. He saw the popularization of “culture” (art, books, thought) by, lets say it, capitalism, as vulgar and just all wrong. It took some explaining by him to make his point and ultimately his essay “masscult and midcult” did not and does not work very well because you just cannot generalize that much and still be valid. People change, tastes change, dumb people become smarter, taste-makers become more vulgar. See, generalizations . See also niki minaj http://www.entertainmentwise.com/news... . Macdonald was a thoughtful and passionate thinker and his other essays on james gould cossen (he wrote “by loved possessed” and it was a wild bestseller, 170,000 copies in first 6 weeks, but macdonald pointed out what a true piece-of-shit that novel really is, where is macdonald now?!?!, we need him to take on james patterson and gulp, jd robb et al.) norman cousins and tom wolfle are really wonderful. He also did some muckraking on the Book-of-the-millennium club and what a bunch of bogus shysterism that was (alas, there are still plenty of that kind of thing going on today, but as much as I hate amazon, really people are reading more and better today than ever before, WITHOUT the help of Harold bloom). There is a beautiful review too of 1952 publication of the “revised standard version of the bible” vs the king james version and it is a passionate and smart analysis of the bible as lit, with the rsvb a poor 2nd to the kjv. Anyway, yeah! for nyrb for collecting and having Louis Menard doing the introduction to this important 20th century usa thinker. Ps: the essay “the Triumph of the Fact” is a beautiful reason why we need info/internet literacy more now than ever

[Tobias · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed bag. Some of these essays haven't dated well at all, in at least one case because Macdonald's evisceration of the subject was so completely that the subject was forgotten soon thereafter. Several of these essays - "Masscult and Midcult," "The String Untuned," "The Triumph of the Fact" - have genuine lasting value that speak to problems we face today. "The String Untuned" is of particular interest for David Foster Wallace obsessives, since it anticipated (and probably inspired) DFW's "Tense Present" in Harper's and covers much of the same ground on the debate between prescriptive and descriptive grammar.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

The essay "The Triumph of the Fact" was right up my alley. Macdonald would be horrified to see how much more data dependent American culture is today. I got the sense that the first time you met Macdonald at a dinner party, you'd find him engaging and interesting, and think he was someone you'd enjoy arguing with from time to time, but that the second time you met him at a dinner party, you'd realize he was actually intolerable.

[Sketchbook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hail, Dwight Macdonald ! His masscult-midcult essays:
sublime. (GR spews midcult; Dw detested midcult..)
A friend asked about peops : "Does X have an interesting
mind?" Aaah, that is the question... ~ Mac oft flashed
a quote fr Michael Bakunin -- "I shall continue to be
an impossible person so long as those who are now
possible remain possible." Hail, Big Mac !

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A midcentury view at mass culture. Fascinating. The two best essays are the one on the new "translation" of the King James Bible and the 3d edition of Webster's Dictionary compared to the 2d edition. Both are hysterical. Anyone interested in American social history will enjoy this collection.

[Tom Bevilacqua · Rating 3 out of 5]

My lower review of this has less to do with the quality of the writing (which is outstanding) but rather how much I disagree with MacDonald and his assertions (particularly his writing about Hemingway, though I'm glad they included the response from George Plimpton)

[Stephen Coates · Rating 3 out of 5]

The opening essay was on his classification of cultures as mass (masscult), high culture and middle (midcult), the first two being long recognised whereas the third, in between mass and high cultures, had been a development of the 20th century. The book claimed that in mass cultures, people aren’t relating to each other but to an abstract organising principle although it didn’t make the counterclaim that in mid and high cultures, people were relating to each other. Curious. It also claimed that the emergence of midcult reduced the potential market for high culture. The discussion of masscult, midcult and high culture was detailed and interesting, especially when the book analysed the writing of Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Erle Stanley Gardner (author of the Perry Mason novels) and other writers in terms of these cultures.

Subsequent chapters examined the writing of James Agee’s, in particular his novel A Death in the Family, Ernest Hemmingway and James Gould Cozens’s and his then recently-published By Love Possessed. While all three authors were widely acclaimed, the book challenged such acclamation with detailed analysis of A Death in the Family and By Love Possessed arguing, in the case of the second, the critics’ almost unanimous praise perhaps reflected a collective belief that it was "his turn" for accolades, noting that no matter the quality of the books at the time, something must always top the best seller list. I’d say the same applies to the "top 40" in pop music. In the case of Hemmingway, acknowledging some of his early books were good, the book rubbished most of his mid and late career writing.

The next chapter looked the Book of the Millennium, a massive collection of what was perceived to be the best writing, ever, in literature as well as science, with 443 works by 76 authors all packed into a number of heavy volumes. Some authors, it argued, were over-represented, some others under-represented and many worthy authors were not included at all. In some cases, only a chapter of a major work was included, there was an over-emphasis on authors who wrote in English and the works of science had been written by scientists for other scientists. And if that wasn’t enough, this was accompanied by the Syntopicon, a two-volume index to the great ideas in the great books, 202 in total, plus an index of a further 1,690 ideas deemed to be respectable but not great as well as a bibliography of additional readings itself comprising 2,603 books that didn’t make the grade. But perhaps more significantly, the book would have set the buyer back a whopping $250 which was a considerable sum in 1952. Moreover, MacDonald posed the question of who will buy it, as those who enjoy reading those books deemed to be great are likely to already have many of them and those without probably won’t want to read them at all. I see parallels with those collections of "greatest hits" of classical music, jazz, dance music, etc.

"On September 30th of 1952, two million people in over three thousand communities in the United States and Canada attended meetings celebrating the appearance of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible", so began the next chapter which examined this new text. Explaining that the King James Bible, completed in 1611, had been compiled by a team of scholars at a period "when style was the common property of educated men rather than individual achievement". After giving a history of the various translations of the Bible into English, the first in 735, and a few that earned their translators an execution, the book gave a very thorough examination of how the new translation lost the majesty of original. Whether the reader is a believer or is not, this chapter makes a very solid case for leaving the original text alone.

The book then delves into the parajournalism of Tom Wolfe which reached its peak, or plunged to its deepest depth depending upon one’s outlook, with his The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby as MacDonald summed up "He [Tom Wolfe] takes the middle course, shifting gears between fact and fantasy, spoof and reportage until nobody knows which end is, at the moment, up". What makes this a gem is that, in reviewing Wolfe’s parajournalism, the authors wrote it with just as much flair, ambiguity, exaggeration and misrepresentation as he does, but at the same time putting him in his place with "Marianne Moore defines poetry as putting real toads into imaginary gardens. Wolfe has reversed the process: his decor is real but his toads are dubious". The final chapter gives a history of The Saturday Review.

Decades after the essays that became the chapters of this book were written, the writing remains a delight to read even if, in some cases, the relevance of the subject matter has faded.

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent introduction to Macdonald's thought and style, particularly the namesake essay. Other gems include "The Triumph of the Fact" ("Because we understand the parts—the Facts—we have the comforting illusion that we understand the whole"; "We are obsessed with technique, hagridden by Facts, in love with information"), his beautiful takedown of Hemingway ("A feeling that loyalty and bravery are the cardinal virtues and that physical action is the basis of the good life—even when reinforced with the kind of nihilism most of us get over by the age of twenty—these don't add up to a philosophy") and James Agee ("Agee was an American, of a race that matures slowly, if ever.").

But no review would be complete without an excerpt from 'Masscult and Midcult':

“I see Masscult—and its recent offspring, Midcult—as a reciprocating engine, and who is to say, once it has been set in motion, whether the stroke or the counterstroke is responsible for its continued action? The Lords of Kitsch sell culture to the masses. It is a debased, trivial culture that avoids both the deep realities (sex, death, failure, tragedy) and also the simple, spontaneous pleasures, since the realities would be too real and the pleasures too lively to induce what Mr. Seldes calls “the mood of consent”: a narcotized acceptance of Masscult-Midcult and of the commodities it sells as a substitute for the unsettling and unpredictable (hence unsalable) joy, tragedy, wit, change, originality and beauty of real life. The masses—and don’t let’s forget that this term includes the well-educated fans of The Old Man and the Sea, Our Town, J.B., and John Brown’s Body—who have been debauched by several generations of this sort of thing, in turn have come to demand such trivial and comfortable cultural products. Which came first, the chicken or the egg, the mass demand or its satisfaction (and further stimulation), is a question as academic as it is unanswerable. The engine is reciprocating and shows no signs of running down.”

[CHILTONM · Rating 4 out of 5]

I see Masscult--and its recent offspring Midcult--as a reciprocating engine, and who is to say, once it has been set in motion, whether the stroke or the counterstroke is responsible for its actions? The Lords of Kitsch sell culture to the masses. It is a debased, trivial culture that avoids both the deep realities (sex, death, failure, tragedy) and also the simple spontaneous pleasures, since the realities would be too real and the pleasures too lively to induce what Mr. Seldes calls "the mood of consent": a narcotized acceptance of Masscult-Midcult and of the commodities it sells as a substitute for the unsettling and unpredictable (hence unsalable) joy, tragedy, wit, change, originality and beauty of real life.

Fantastic. So much fun to read even when I think the shit he is saying is absurd. There's 25 pages of him railing against American fact-worship ("BRING VIBES BACK") and then the next piece is him looking at Tom Wolfe and going no, actually. too many vibes. Love it unironically

Dwight Macdonald writes:
Mr. Griffing's note strikes at the raison d'être of my career. I've always specialized in negative criticism--literary, political, cinematic, cultural--because I've found so few contemporary products about which I could be "constructive" without hating myself in the morning. Mr. Cousins's unfortunate magazine and cultural influence are the latest of a series of impostures and vulgarizations I've thought needed to have the mickey taken out of them pro bono publico. Earlier examples of this effort include Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, Henry Wallace's Progressive Party campaign, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, the Adler-Hutchins fifty-volume set of Great Books complete with two-volume Synopticon, and too many movies to record.

[Mattjmjmjm · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting take on the rise of mass culture and middle brow culture, despite its weak style(compared to Theodor W. Adorno writings). It falls into this trap of romanticizing the Avant grade of the 1850s to 1950s for it's individualised and innovative art. Modernism was a really brief movement in cultural and political history, it can't be redone. Being strictly highbrow in the 21 century really makes no sense, the cultural opporunities are far wider than in the past and even the low brow can be thoughtful in it's own way. I think I have read too many of these type of books bemoaning the lack of standards in culture since the rise of mass media and democracy really made this post modern world inveitable. The cultural products of modernism came from an cultural elite that doesn't exist anymore, one that wasn't exposed to popular culture as we know it and that didn't live in a globalised culture. They were reacting against the traditional art of the 19th and bourgiose norms, the represented a new sensibility. Each new era has it's cultural products with different sensibilities and modes of understanding the world. The world of literature and music has opened more than ever before to groups not privileged enough to create art in the world that wasn't open to them in the past. Althought as of right now I don't respect post modern art as much as modernist art but I can see the flaws of modernism and it's historical limitation. Middle Brow culture is just there to make up the difference between low and high, a cultural bridge. There really should be no brow just genuine and authentic art for everyone.