MASSCULT AND MIDCULT
Recently a friend had a manuscript rejected by
-a
prom–
inent Midcult magazine. "It's full of speculative
ap.erfus/ '
wrote the editor, "but it's just not a 'journalistic' piece of lhe
kind we need. What I mean is, it
is
too
speculative.
I
find die
speculations fascinating [they always do] but they simply
go
beyond the pragmatics of the problems, which are necesSarily
crucial to us."
This
attitude, of course,
is
neither new nor
limited to this country. One recalls the report that Edward
Garnett wrote in 1916 for the London firm of Duckworth,
which was considering a manuscript by an obscure Irish writer :
[It] wants going through carefully from start to finish. There
are many 'longueurs'. Passages which, though the publisher's reader
may find them entertaining, will be tedious to the ordinary man
among the reading public. That public will call the book, as it
stands at present, realistic, unprepossessing, unattractive. We call it
ably written. The picture is 'curious', it arouses interest and atten–
tion. But the author must revise it and let us see it again. It
is
too
discursive, formless, unrestrained, and ugly things, ugly words, are
too prominent .. . The point of view will be voted 'a little sordid.'
. ... Unless the author will use restraint and proportion, he will
not gain readers.
The book was
A P8rtrait of the Artist as a Young Man;
Mr.
Garnett was one of a celebrated English literary family, and the
episode (see Richard EUmann's
James Joyce,
416-419) shows
the limitations of my cultural-community concept, if the ·point
needs demonstrating. For the first edition of the
Portrait '
was
finally published by an American, B. W. Huebsch.
In some ways the closest parallel we have to the British
weeklies is
The New Yorker,
which has always been edited with
the assumption that the readers have the same tastes as the
editors and so need not be in any way appeased or placated;
the reader is the forgotten man around
T he New Yorker,
whose
editors insist on making their own mistakes, a formul;l that ha·s
worked for thirty years of successful publishing; perhaps because
