MASSCULT AND MIDCULT
609
Willcox yields to Stephen Vincent Benet. Maxfield .Parrish's
Day Dreams
is replaced on the living-room wall by Van Gogh's
Sunflowers,
or even a Picasso print. Billy Sunday's Bible-shout–
ing acrobatics are toned down to Billy Graham's more civilized
approach, though with what gain to religious feeling
has
yet
to be seen. In literary criticism, the artless enthusiasm of a
William Lyon Phelps has modulated into the more restrained
yea-saying of a Clifton Fadiman or a Granville Hicks. The late
Arthur Brisbane used to speculate in short, punchy paragraphs
separated by asterisks (they have been compared to the pau$eS
a barroom philosopher makes to spit reflectively into the saw–
dust) on such topics as whether a gorilla could beat up a heavy–
weight champion in fair fight; but he would hardly
go
over as
a columnist today, not even in that Hearst press whose circula–
tion he swelled fifty years ago. He has been superseded by
types like Dr. Max Lerner of the
N.Y. Post,
who can bring
Freudian theory to bear on the sex life of Elizabeth Taylor
and Eddie Fisher. Dr. Lerner was once managing editor of
the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences; more recently he compiled
a Midcult classic titled
America as a Civilization
in which he
amassed 1,036 pages of data and interpretations without
of–
fending any religious, racial, political or social group.
It
is a
solemn thought what he would do with Brisbane's man v.
gorilla problem; as I recall, Brisbane finally concluded the
gorilla would win; Dr. Lerner would probably take a more
rounded viewpoint; his humanistic frame of reference would
incline him to favor the heavyweight, but he would be careful
to
explain that no intrinsic inferiority was involved; just a
matter of social environment. Gorillas are people too.
A tepid ooze of Midcult is spreading everywhere. Psycho–
analysis is expounded sympathetically and superficially in
popular magazines. Institutions like the Museum of Modern
Art
and the American Civil Liberties Union, once avant-garde
and tiny, are now flourishing and respectable;· but something
