248
VARIETY
POPULAR TASTE AND
"THE CAINE MUTINY"
In the months that have passed
since the publication of Herman
Wouk's
The Caine Mutiny,
it
has
become something of a phenom–
enon in the publishing business by
climbing slowly to the top of the
best-seller lists without fanfare or
ballyhoo, and then staying there
week after week, month after
month, until it begins to look now
like another
Gone With The Wind.
Why?
I should like to suggest that
the answer will reveal a good deal
about the changes that have re–
cently taken place in the reading
taste of the American public as
well as in what is known as pop–
ular culture. The best-seller, un–
like the movie or even the musical
comedy, is stilI the work of one
man, a creative craftsman of
greater or lesser skill responding
directly to his sense of the public
taste. In the case of Mr. Wouk,
this skill is pressed into the serv–
ice of a mythmaking that more or
less corresponds to certain ideas
currently dominant in American
middle-class life.
The Caine Mu–
tiny
is in every aspect a faithful
reflection of the morals, fears, and
intellectual aspirations of the new
middle class, that proliferant
white collar segment of the Amer–
ican community that is basically
responsible for "progressive" mov–
ies praised because they deal-no
matter how-with the problems of
minonties,
musical
comedies
praised because their songs are
filled with "social significance,"
and radio programs praised
be–
cause in the recent past, before
television, they evolved a kind of
rhetorical statement that passed
for poetry.
This new middle class, many of
its members the successful sons
and daughters of struggling and
bewildered immigrants, is yearly
producing larger and more avid
audiences of high school and
(in–
creasingly) college graduates
with
more leisure time than working
people ever had before. Impatient
with traditional pulp stories, West–
ern movies, and show-girl musical
comedies, they want to feel that
their intelligences are engaged by
the programs they hear, the mov–
ies they see, the books they read;
and they take it as an act
of
social piety and, by extension, of
artistic integrity, when these media
feature favorable stereotypes of
minorities once represented by un–
favorable caricatures. At the same
time they participate in a kind of
mass snobbery of which they are
all but unaware, on the one hand
rejecting in angry frustration those
whom they instinctively fear and
admire-aristocrats,
millionaires
and serious-minded intellectuals,
and on the other hand patroniz–
ing the underlying population
with pseudo-democratic verbiage
