622
DWIGHT MACDONALD
conceptualized picture of the reader. [Mary McCarthy wrote
several years ago in a prospectus for a monthly of political, social
and cultural comment which never materialized because we
couldn't get enough backing.] The reader, in this view, is a person
stupider than the editor whom the editor both fears and patronizes.
He plays the same role the child plays in the American hom:e and
school, the role of an inferior being who must nevertheless be pro–
pitiated.
What our readers will take
is the watchword. ... When
an article today is adulterated, this is not done out of respect for
the editor's prejudices (which might at least give us an individual–
istic and eccentric journalism) but in deference to the reader's
averageness and supposed stupidity. The fear of giving offense to
some hypothetical dolt and the fear of creating a misunderstand–
ing have replaced the fear of advertisers' reprisals.
The new magazine's editors do not accept this picture of the
reader; they make no distinction between the reader and them–
selves. And in fact they insist on this as a cardinal democratic
premise; the only premise on which free communication between
human beings can be carried on. They do not look upon
Critic
as a permanent philanthropic enterprise. They believe there are
100,000 people in a country of 150,000,000 who will buy it
regularly, once they have been made aware of its existence.
As
I say, the money was not raised and
Critic
did not appear.
But I don't think Mary McCarthy's estimate of the possible
circulation was unrealistic; a masochistic underestimation of
the audience for good work in every field, even the movies, even
television, is typical of the American cultural entrepreneur.
Some good movies have made money, after all, and many bad
ones, though concocted according to the most reliable formulae,
have failed to. Nobody really knows and it seems to me more
democratic, as Miss McCarthy observes, to assume that one's
audience is on one's own level than that they are the "hypo–
thetical dolts" which both the businessmen of Hollywood and
the revolutionaries of the
Universities
&
Left Review
assume
they are.
