620
DWIGHT MACDONALD
The English amateur scholar-"just a hobby, really"-is a
species little known over here. Most educated Englishmen seem
to take an interest in cultural matters as a matter of course, and
many of them have a personal, non-professional knowledge
of one or two fields-a disinterested interest, so to speak
- which is quite impressive. Our college graduates are not
apt to "keep up" with such things unless they teach them.
Their hobbies are less likely to
be
Jacobean madrigals than
home workshops equipped with the latest
in
power
tools
and
their equivalent of the British weekly is likely to be
Time
or
Newsweek.
In only one field do we match their amateur
scholarship. The sports pages are our equivalent of the
Times
Literary Supplement ;
in each case, experts write for a sizable
audience that is assumed to understand the fine points. Perhaps
a snobbish past, I see them as dikes against the corruption of Mass–
cult and Midcult. They see standards as inhibiting, I see them as
defining. They see tradition as deadening, I see it as nourishing. It
may be that, as an American, I idealize the British situation. But I hope
not as absurdly as they idealize ours. Last year I gave a talk on mass
culture at a
Universities
&
Left Review
forum in London. I expected
the audience, which was much younger than I, to object to my lack
of enthusiasm for socialism, though it was distressing to find them
still talking about capitalism and the working class in the simplistic
terms I hadn't heard since I left the Trotskyists; the problems we
thought about in the 'thirties seem to be just coming up now in
England; the illusions we were forced to abandon through bitter exper·
ience seem still current over there. (We did have a political-intellectual
community in the 'thirties here, perhaps that explains our relatively
advanced thinking in this area.) But what I was not prepared for was
the reaction to my attacks on Hollywood and other aspects of our
mass culture. These were actually resented in the name of democracy.
Hollywood to me was an instance of the corruption of art by com–
mercialism and of the exploitation rather than the satisfying of popular
tastes. But to some of those who took the floor after my talk, Holly–
wood was a genuine expression of the masses. They seemed to think it
snobbish of me to criticize our movies and television from a serious
viewpoint. Since I had been criticizing Hollywood for some thirty years,
and always with the good conscience one has when one is attacking
from the Left, this proletarian defense of our peculiar institution left
·me rather dazed.
