M I D D L E B R O W B E A T E N
Earnestly clutching his list of Improving Books, it's hard to imagine anyone being quite so, well, crass about it today. At a 1952 banquet for the founding subscribers to a Great Books series put together by Mortimer J. Adler and the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, book reviewer and radio host Clifton Fadiman told his audience that buying the set was a heroic accomplishment of cultural preservationism. Like "the monks of early Christendom," he explained, the Great Books buyers were taking upon themselves "the burden of preserving ... through another darkening ... age the vision, the laughter, the ideas, the deep cries of anguish, the great eurekas of revelation that make up our patent to the title of civilized man." And all for the low, low price of $249.50, payable in installments with only $10 down. As cultural critic Dwight Macdonald noted, that was 100 pounds of timeless knowledge -- at less than $2.50 a pound! The middlebrow culture that drew Macdonald's ire, virtually institutionalized through cultural endeavors like the Book of the Month Club and Alexander Woolcott's "Town Crier" radio show, seems in recent years to have vanished from the American landscape almost entirely, along with such other remnants of mid-century kitsch as Andy Hardy movies and Norman Rockwell. Sure, we have our own versions of middlebrow -- Bill Moyers specials, "A Prarie Home Companion," all those flatulent Time magazine think (but-not-too-hard) pieces on "Emotional Intelligence" or "Jesus Online." And the Book of the Month Club still mails out its regular selections, though some of its thunder has been stolen by the cheaper and less pretentious Quality Paperback Book Club. But middlebrow has been so thoroughly excoriated by its various critics -- from Macdonald, who looked with curmudgeonly disdain upon the "tepid ooze" of "Midcult," to Virginia Woolf, who denounced each of its representatives as a "bloodless and pernicious pest" -- that the term itself is hardly ever used anymore. Though it pains me a little to have to say so, I think it's time we gave middlebrow another hearing. I've always scoffed at middlebrow's more sanctimonious manifestations, from the self-congratulatory prattle of PBS pledge weeks to William Bennett's dogged parade of virtues. But now I'm beginning to think I've been too hasty in my dismissal. NEXT PAGE: Four cheers for middlebrow! |
