MASSCULT AND MIDCULT
619
These British weeklies have large enough circulations to be self–
supporting and to pay their contributors a living wage. Their
~earest
parallels here, in quality, are our "little" magazines,
which come out either quarterly or bi-monthly, have small
circulations (5,000 is par, 15,000 prodigious), run at a chronic
deficit and pay contributors and editors meagerly.
What must be done here marginally, with help from
"angels" either personal or institutional, can be done there as
a normal part of journalism. Although a much smaller per–
centage of the English population goes to college, they have a
larger and more cohesive cultural community than we do. The
sale of a serious non-fiction book by a writer who is not a
Name, for instance, is often larger there than here despite our
three or four times larger population. Here a book tends to be
either a best-seller or nothing, as a writer is either a Success or
a Failure; there is no middle ground because there
is
no intel–
lectual class. This may also be the reason more titles are pub–
lished there; in 1958 it was 16,700 there, 11,000 here; it is the
difference between handicraft and mass production, between a
number of articulated publics and one great amorphous mass
market.
England still has something of a functioning class system,
culturally speaking. The angry young men are angry about it.
I can't think why.
An
American living in London is delighted
by the wide interest in
art
and letters, the liveliness of the intel·
lectual atmosphere, the sense he gets constantly from the press
and from conversations of a general interest in what he is
interested in. It is, of course, general only to perhaps five per
cent of the population, but in America it isn't even this much
general; it
is
something shared only with friends and profes–
sional acquaintances. But in London one meets stockbrokers
who go to concerts, politicians who have read Proust.
8
8. ActualIy, I
can
think why the young men are angry. The Enemy looks
very different from there than from here. From there, it is too little
democracy; from here, too much. They see cultural lines as relics of
