WILLIAM PHILLIPS
9
Book-of-the-Month Club. She does not realize that Arnold was com–
batting philistinism among the educated, and that he was upholding the
idea of tradition - the tradition of the best that has been thought and
written, the tradition, that is, of the classics. He was not a promoter of
middlebrow culture for the masses. Similarly, Rubin doesn't seem to un–
derstand that Emerson, whom she sometimes places within the "genteel
tradition," at other times among the salesmen of self-improvement, was
advocating the development of a native culture free of the dominance of
England and adapted to the individualism of the equalitarian myths.
Perhaps Rubin's cardinal error is her confusion of the selling of
books with the content of books, that is, of the selling of good books
with the selling of bad ones. Thus she mixes up selling the classics with
selling popular works. And she fails to distinguish the commercial mer–
chandising of books in general with books and commentary that actual–
lly are middlebrow in content. As a result, she sidesteps the basic question
attending middlebrow culture: the spread of kitsch under the rational–
ization of educating the people. This leads her to overestimate the effects
of pure huckstering and to underestimate the growth of middlebrowism
through the entire culture. Indeed, she ignores completely the takeover
by popular culture of books, television, and the movies. After all, these
constitute the culture, the values, and the ideas of most of the popula–
tion. That the classics are also sold by the same methods as kitsch and
popular entertainment is a complication Rubin does not face.
Rubin is so occupied with the gimmicks and the personalities in–
volved in the sale of an inferior culture that she never goes into the ori–
gins of middlebrow culture which lie in the unique history of the coun–
try. Because of its late arrival and the constant breaking of new frontiers,
America lacked the cultural aristocracies of Western Europe. To counter
the rough-and-ready culture that grew up, there developed both the
high-minded efforts at education and a substitute culture for mass con–
sumption. The later efforts to systemize the distrubtion of this substitute
culture and make it profitable, the methods by which various cultural
entrepreneurs built it up, Rubin describes in much detail in her book.
Some of the efforts at raising the level of taste and judgement empha–
sized the qualities of truth and character to be associated with high liter–
ature, which Rubin unknowingly attributes to the spirit of the
"gente~l
tradition." However, she seems unaware that until the modern period
the pursuit of truth had been attributed to the value of the classic litera–
ture. It is not clear whether the association of "truth" with "beauty"
was simply an intellectual convention or a strategy for making literature
appear less frivolous. In any case, it long antedated what Rubin calls the
"genteel tradition."
In the end, Rubin straddles the issues raised by the influence and
