206
DWIGHT
,MACDONALD
academic contemporaries; their works may be seen as a heroic
break-through to earlier, sounder foundations that had been
obscured by the fashionable gimcrackery of the academies. But
Masscult is indifferent to standards, brushing aside both tradition
and innovation if they don't sell goods on the maximum market.
Nor is there any communication between individuals. Those who
consume Masscult might as well be eating ice-cream sodas, while
those who fabricate it are no more expressing themselves than
are the "stylists" who design the latest atrocity from Detroit.
The difference appears if we compare two famous writers
of detective stories, Mr. ErIe Stanley Gardner and Mr. Edgar
Allan Poe. It is impossible to find any personal note in Mr.
Gardner's enormous output-he has just celebrated his centen–
ary, the hundredth novel under his own name (he also has
knocked off several dozen under pseudonyms). His prose style
varies between the incompetent and the non-existent; for the
most part, there is just no style, either good or bad. His books
seem to have been manufactured rather than composed; they
are assembled with the minimum expenditure of effort from
identical parts that are shifted about just enough to allow the
title to be changed from
The Case of the Curious Bride
to
The
Case of the Fugitive Nurse.
Mr. Gardner obviously has the pro–
duction-line fertility. His popularity indicates he has the
Very Good as a lawyer, Good as a business analyst, and Zero
as a writer, and the last realistic estimate is the clue to his pro–
duction-line fertility-and his popularity indicates he has the
problem of distribution well in hand. He is marketing a standard
product, like Kleenex, that precisely because it is not related to
any individual needs on the part of either the producer or the
consumer appeals to the widest possible audience. The obsession
of our fact-minded culture with the processes of the law is prob–
ably the lowest common denominator that has made Mr. Gard–
ner's unromantic romances such dependable commodities ever
since
The Ca'se of the Velvet Claws
(1933).
Like Mr. Gardner, Mr. Poe was a money-writer. (That he
