8
PARTISAN REVIEW
His relation to Delmore was ambivalent and also had an element of
dreamy utopianism. He came to me one day to complain that he was
having to do work on the magazine
th~t
should 'have been done by
Delmore, who, unlike Will, was a compulsive non-worker. He appar–
ently thought that as a friend I could help straighten things out. But I
could neither reduce Barrett's capacity for work nor Schwartz's capacity
for avoiding it.
When Barrett resigned, he thought it was time for him to move on
to other things, though he continued to write frequently for the maga–
zine . For us at
Partisan Review,
it was time to continue what we thought
of as our chosen work, if not our mission.
Browbeating the Public
De pite its many confusions and oversim–
plifications,
The Making of Middlebrow Culture
by Joan S. Rubin could be
useful in documenting several aspects of the subject. It does give in some
detail - too much detail - the history of literary talk shows, book clubs,
and the lives of a number of the dispensers of middlebrow culture. Thus
we learn more than we need to know about the lives of Henry Seidel
Canby, Alexander Woollcott, Carl Van Doren, John Erskine, and Will
Durant, among others, as well as the history of the Book-of-the-Month
Club . But because her book is marred by the substitution of facts for
understanding - a staple of academic writing - and because Ms. Rubin
fails to take a clear position, it is essentially a middlebrow history of
middlebrow culture. Nevertheless,
The Making of Middlebrow Culture
is
worth considering precisely because its faults are typical of the homoge–
nization of the culture fashionable today, especially in the academy.
The errors lie at the heart of Rubin's conception of the subject. To
begin with, she counterposes middlebrowism to the "genteel tradition"
as well as to the avant-garde and what she calls modernism. She gets her
notion of the "genteel tradition" from Santayana, for whom it was a
much more complicated phenonemon. Rubin does not understand that
what has become known as the "genteel tradition" originally saw itself
as a corrective, on the part mainly of clergymen and academics, to the
vulgarities of a rapidly expanding frontier society, and was distinct from
the work of serious writers and thinkers. She also applies the labels of
modernism and avant-gardism loosely to all subsequent high-level
writing. And she constantly uses the term "democratic culture" meaning–
lessly, as something vaguely desirable, and "elitism," equally meaninglessly,
as something bad.
One of the main flaws of the book is its misunderstanding of
Matthew Arnold, whom Rubin seems to regard as the ancestor of the
