Irving Howe was on the warpath. The year was 1954, and Howe saw the forces of depravity closing in. He saw the great maw of middle class commercialism — magazines, publishing houses, movie studios. Vast institutions that could buy you off, beat you down, crush your spirit. Howe surveyed the landscape and saw the broken souls of his colleagues: “Writers today have no choice, often enough, but to write for magazines like the New Yorker — and worse, far worse.”
The horror of it was almost too much to contemplate. But intellectuals of that age didn’t flinch. They had located a force that threatened to destroy civilization, and that force was dubbed “middlebrow” (Virginia Woolf’s term). Middle class Americans were trying to educate themselves. These arrivistes were reading the Saturday Review and the New York Times Book Review and tromping with their moralistic steps over everything that was sacred and subtle. The middle classes were going to museums and joining the Book of the Month Club, admiring “literature” in the form of Thornton Wilder and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. They were creating a new form of consumer culture.
Intellectuals at mid-century looked around and decided that the middlebrow influx was the major threat to the culture they acttec. It wasn’t barbarism or ignorance or nihilism that set off their fury. It was the genteel tradition and middle class cultural aspiration. They were so revolted by middlebrow piety that they set out to ridicule and undermine it. And they did. But they didn’t understand that this was a Pyrrhic victory. The highbrows didn’t only undermine the Saturday Review; their own authority and the standards they held dear were victims of collateral damage. Today, middlebrow earnestness is hardly in evidence; it has been replaced by a pervasive and corrosive irony. You don’t see as much pretentious attitudinizing about “Art,” but at a high cost: The hierarchy of high and low culture has been scrambled beyond recognition. You don’t see as many people consuming culture as if it were an exercise machine (,Read philosophy 20 minutes a day and have a better soul!), but then again culture no longer seems so important to us culture and virtue has been severed.
Virginia Woolf called the midlebrow “sticky slime” and “a pernicious pest.” Clement Greenberg called it an “insidious” force, with its capacity for “devaluating the precious, infecting the healthy, corrupting the honest and stultifying the wise.” Dwight MacDonald condemned the “tepid ooze” of the Museum of Modern Art and the American Civil Liberties Union. He investigated the Great Books series, the educational radio programs, the Book of the Month Club, and called middle class culture “the dange . . . the enemy outside the walls . . . the swamp.”
These intellectuals preferred a world in which High Culture was high (their milieu) and everything else was low. The middlebrow world, on the other hand, mimicked high culture, but it didn’t live up to its standards. Editorials in magazines ike the Saturday Review carried such painfully earnest headlines as “The Future Belongs to the Educated Man” and “Art: Giver of Life and Peace.” Life magazine carried full-page ads for a four volume set of the classics of mathematical theory, which reduced the most abstract form of intellection into coffee-table publishing. Dwight MacDonald was disturbed by the way Life mixed the high with the low: An editorial hailing Bertrand Russell’s 80th birthday (“A Great Mind is Still Annoying and Adorning Our Age” ) ran opposite a photo of a mother arguing with a Little League umpire (“Mom Gets Thumb”). Middlebrow culture made it impossible to distinguish between who was serious and who was not. It corrupted everything with its moralizing, and bought off true artists with lures of wealth. “Let the masses have their Masscult, let the few who care about good writing, painting, music, architecture, philosophy, etc., have their High Culture, and don’t fuzz up the distinction with Midcult,” MacDonald concluded.
It is easy to see why the middlebrow institutions grated on highbrow sensibilities. The middlebrow magazines of the 1950s were incredibly highminded and pompous. They were committed to a series of secular religions – – Art can save your soul; Philosophy can lead to truth; Psychiatry can plumb the depths of the human mind — that are hard to take so seriously today.
The treatment of art, for example, was particularly cloying. On the one hand, popular magazines devoted an awesome amount of space to art. Time magazine devoted more space in 1956 to contemporary painting than to Hollywood. There were six-page spreads devoted to the abstract expressionists, long treatments of British painters called the Kitchen Sink School, and generous attention given to even obscure painters such as Charles Burchfield and Stanton MacDonald-Wright.
But on the other hand, the seriousness with which Time and its ilk took these painters, and the seriousness with which artists took themselves, is ludicrous. “A single stroke of paint, backed by work and a mind that understood its potency and implications, could restore to man the freedom lost in twenty centuries of apology and devices for subjugation,” wrote the painter Clyfford Still.
Writers frequently claimed that America’s social problems derived from the fact that Americans were not in touch with their artistic geniuses. “We have lost our concern with ends because we have lost our touch with reality because we are estranged from the means to reality which is the poem — a work of art,” wrote the ur-middlebrow poet Archibald MacLeish in the Atlantic. Middlebrows treated artists as priests and oracles, and writers and artists themselves were happy to accept this ordination. Playwright Arthur Miller said as much in a speech at Harvard that was reprinted in the Atlantic: “American civilization is only recently coming to a conscious awareness of art not as a luxury but as a necessity of life. . . . In the proroundest sense I cannot create that form unless, somewhere in you, there is a wish to know the present and a demand upon me that I give it to you.” The treatment of Freud and psychiatry generally in the fifties was similarly pretentious. The New Republic published a column called “A Psychiatrist Comments” in which psychiatrists would offer their professional views on politics and social situations. In July 1956, Henry A. Davidson, M.D ., wrote a piece called “Our Mouth Centered Culture” in which he argued, without a touch of irony, that “we are deep in an oral stage of our culture.” He maintained that the mouth is a symbol of security, since we spend the most secure moments of our lives suckling at our mother’s breast. He claimed that the voter’s concern for income security, much talked about in 1956, was an attempt to recapture this oral contentment.
Psychiatry was an imperial profession in those days, with psychiatrists and the psychiatry-minded feeling competent to speak on all sorts of issues. The Harvard Business Review published essays like “The Executive Neurosis.” Cultural essays might mention Freud’s castration theory. David Riesman explained Thorstein Veblen’s rebelliousness as a projection of father-hatred. Richard Hofstadter explained the ultraconservatives as a collection of people whose hostility toward their parents “cannot be admitted to consciousness.” All of the stuff we now dismiss as trashy Gall Sheehy reductionism was in the 1950s treated with utmost respect and seriousness.
In these as in so many realms, middlebrows and highbrows had a weakness for the Big Idea and the sweeping conclusion. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a book called The Nature and Destiny of Man, a title so ambitious that nobody would dare use it today. Looking through the magazines, one finds similarly broad topics, in the highbrow Partisan Review straight down to the quintessentially middlebrow Saturday Review. Harper’s magazine presented an essay by a Frenchman named Raymond Leopold Bruckberger grandly titled “An Assignment for Intellectuals” which it summarized as follows: “A French soldier-priest suggests that American writers are shirking their duty — not only to their country — but to Truth.”
Nobody uses words like truth and art in the upper case these days. It is hard to work up much faith in the secular faiths that were so evident in the 1950s. Nonetheless, don’t we feel their loss? Next to the middlebrow culture of the fifties, ours seems an age of cynics, an age with relatively few things to be idealistic about.
At the center of middlebrow there was an admirable faith that the quality of one’s character was in one’s own hands. Leisure time spent with high culture would make you a better person. This creed drew on the long-standing Emersonian faith in high culture. “Culture,” Emerson wrote in 1867, “implies all which gives the mind possession of its own powers.” And the idea drew on the Unitarian tradition of self-mastery. A person’s leisure time was considered consequential. If it was spent with works of art that were purifying, then character would be uplifted. Such a person would have richer perceptions and a fuller life. Degraded culture, on the other hand, would appeal only to the “lower self” and magnify that aspect of a person’s personality. In short, how you spent your leisure time mattered; the choices you made would affect the quality of your character.
This is an optimistic creed, because it holds that people are in control of their own moral destinies. It’s also a democratic creed. An editorial in the New Republic in 1922 said that the colleges of that period gave ” exclusiveness to the masses.” That paradoxical phrase applies to middlebrow culture as well. An insurance salesman who buys the great books series is joining an aristocracy of thinkers, with access to the most important things in the world — an aristocracy that is open to all who are willing to expend some effort.
There is also a whiff of the World War II mobilization propaganda in middlebrow prose. Its unspoken, and sometimes not unspoken, rallying cry is: The nation is in danger of moral decline. We all must rally round. We must roll up our sleeves. We must improve our minds. Underlying that was the confidence that given the right level of effort and cooperation, no task was too difficult.
Today, we don’t feel so much in control of our moral destinies, either as individuals or as a nation. We don’t feel, as they did, that secular tools are at hand to fashion a moral revival. It probably would have been worth tolerating middlebrow earnestness if we could have back some of that middlebrow faith and idealism. But the highbrows who waged rhetorical wars with the middlebrows didn’t appreciate the good that was enmeshed in the ludicrous. They only saw the clumsiness of it and the onset of commercialism, which follows middle class tastes. The cultural trendsetters of the 1950s revolted against middlebrow in its totality. They began to argue that rich perceptions and character development could be achieved by release rather than by self-discipline, by anti-social behavior rather than by civic do- goodism.
In 1955, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization began its career as a cult classic, with its call for “polymorphous sexuality” that “would lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family.” And two years later Norman Mailer published an essay in Dissent called “The White Negro,” which helped shift the elite definition of what it meant to be a cultivated person. Mailer developed a character called the hipster, who was antithetical to the middlebrow in every way. The hipster was an “American existentialist” who divorced himself from society, who cut himself off from his roots, who lived solely for the present as an outlaw. Mailer seemed to mean this quite literally. The criminal was “daring the unknown” according to Mailer. He wrote that the teenage thugs who bludgeoned a 50-year-old candy store owner to death during the course of a robbery ” should not be despised.” Such thuggery can lead to isolated truths, in pursuit of Mailer’s ultimate goal, an “orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it.”
Other highbrows, less desperate for attention than Mailer, repudiated the middlebrow in other ways. For example, while the middlebrows were earnestly trying to climb up the cultural ladder, many highbrows demonstrated their sophistication by climbing down. The French intellectual Roland Barthes wrote an essay on professional wrestling. Susan Sontag lavishly praised the Beatles in the pages of Partisan Review. Leslie Fiedler was writing about comic books. By the 1970s, a movie critic, Pauline Kael, was considered among the most important cultural critics of the age, and she was praising nudie slasher movies like Carrie and Body Double.
Like the middlebrows, the early anti-middlebrows were strikingly earnest. Indeed, if you page through the magazines of the past 40 years, the big cultural break comes not in the 1960s, with the New Left. It comes in the 1970s, with the popularization of irony. The fifties and sixties seem akin. Archibald MacLeish in the 50s and the New Leftists in the 60s were both serious and earnest, even while arguing for radically different worlds. Kitsch was attacked by both as something disgraceful. The big break came later when a debunking irony took over and little seemed serious and no crime was greater than earnestness. Kitsch was adopted as a badge of ironic sophistication.
Irony is the ultimate rejection of the middlebrow. It undercuts the very premise of the middlebrow, which is that culture and character are things worth being serious about. At first it seems to release you from the stultifying moralism of the middlebrow. But in a world corroded by irony, nobody wants to appear idealistic. Everybody wants to prove he is on to the game. Academic theorists need to show that they can see through and deconstruct high ideals. Journalists need to show that they are not falling for politicians” boilerplate. Hollywood types need to show that they are hard- boiled players. So we all look for the basest motives and speculate on the crassest calculations. “It is whatever is lower that we take to be more real,” Denis de Rougemont once wrote, in a phrase the sums up the current mode.
“We have literally enveloped ourselves in quotation marks,” writes Andrew Delbanco in his new book The Death of Satan. Those quotation marks discredit the idea that it is possible to have faith in anything. The academic theory that has grown up in this era treats people, ideas, and everything else as the product of chance and “civilization” as a series of ideological deceptions. As Delbanco writes, “The idea that man is a receptor of truth from God has been relinquished, and replaced with the idea that reality is an unstable zone between phenomena (unknowable in themselves) and innumerable fields of mental activity (which we call persons) by which they are apprehended.”
Delbanco is talking about his own small academic milieu (religious faith is doing fine among three-quarters of Americans). But the academic theory he describes is reflected in secular mass culture. It is diffcult to worship anything, to be idealistic about anything, to have any faith in the ability to improve one’s character. It is hard even to be confident in one’s ability to develop standards to measure character. Mainstream reporters have absorbed Richard Rorty’s point that we can only be ironic about our own beliefs, because it is only an accident that we happened to be born into our culture with our prejudices, rather than into some other one with a different set of beliefs.
The first victims of pervasive irony have been the academics themselves. In the magazines of the 1950s, a place like Harvard was invested with tremendous authority. It was assumed that there were certain texts that were sacred to understanding the world, and intellectuals, who had mastered these texts, were granted authority to speak on all sorts of matters. Sometimes they abused this authority. Edmund Wilson apparently felt qualified to talk on subjects such as economics on which he clearly knew nothing, and people seemed to listen. Now we have gone off in the other direction. Academics have burrowed into specialization and people outside the academy give them little authority to speak on broader matters, unless (like Doris Kearns Goodwin) they are good on TV. Meanwhile, the artists and novelists, who were treated as oracles in the fifties, are now denizens of their own seminar-circuit ghettos, virtually ignored as truth-tellers by the mainstream culture.
The second victims are those who think it would be nice to be idealistic about something. The common question of the past few years is why we feel so bad while economically we are doing so well. It probably has something to do with the loss of secular ideals. People like to believe in something, to have reverence for something. But pervasive irony punctures secular faiths, and it makes idealism itself seem ridiculous.
So there’s little hope of finding some Great Cause just around the corner. Irony folds in on itself, and we become ironic about our own irony, ever and ever more detached. No wonder there is this vague anxiety running through the body politic, this sense of helplessness and cynicism.
The people in the 1950s had just seen the Nazis and the Holocaust. Those evils do not allow an ironic sensibility; they demand idealistic resistance. That postwar earnestness was frittered away. And now we learn that there is something worse than middlebrow pretentiousness, and that is its absence.
By David Brooks
