VARIETY
MUSKRAT RAMBLE: POPULAR
AND UNPOPULAR MUSIC
" ... in the ripe olives the very cir–
cumstances of their being near to
rottenness adds a peculiar beauty
to the fruit."
It is midafternoon. I come away
from the window and the rooftops
and turn the knob on the radio
that sends a thin line cutting across
the rows of numbers. I would like
to hear, say, Earl Hines playing
"Rosetta" but will settle for a Lee
Wiley record; except for a station
on which a voice not easily dis–
tinguishable from Miss Margaret
Truman's is singing "At Dawning"
and another on which a program
of "light classics" by a feeble string
group emerges oppressively dis–
tinct, all the other stations are play–
ing record after record by big
dance bands. Claude Thornhill,
Kay Kyser, Tex Beneke, Charlie
Spivak, Vaughn Monroe. I switch
off the radio and go into the other
room to pour myself a drink.
We live in a time of triumphant
demonstration of the three ·laws
Mr. Nock found so illuminating:
Epstean's law (people satisfy their
needs and desires with the least
possible exertion), Gresham's (bad
money drives out good money),
614
and the law of diminishing re–
turns.
For the last ten years or more, a
period that has been sufficiently
dispiriting for both High and Pop–
ular Culture, it has still been pos–
sible, though the occasions of pos–
sibility have been rare enough, for
some works of value to emerge.
In High Culture, individual writ–
ers, painters, and composers, most
of them isolated as so many bears
in winter, have gone on working,
and
in
climates colder than most
bears care for. Although Gresham's
law in particular has continued to
function with the efficiency and
drive of a supercharged bonecrush–
er,
it
has had to cope with one fac–
tor that alone has kept the world
from becoming a cultural Nagasaki
-the granitelike recalcitrance of
these figures of High Culture. It
is all that stands between what
little we have left and a world com–
pletely at the mercy of the John
Steinbecks, Eli Siegrneisters, Fib–
ber McGees, Leon Krolls, and
Henry Seidel Canbys.
High Culture, although it has
been subject to the same acceler–
ated tendencies toward decay that
kept Henry Adams awake and put
the world to sleep, still has a kind
of life, however spasmodic its suc–
cesses and however hemmed in by
the all but completely victorious
Middle Culture that takes what it
can assimilate both from High and
Popular Culture for the purpose
of mashing them to death.
