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PARTISAN REVIEW
duction, but who had had firsthand experiences with the Communist
Party in New York, wondered to what extent American intellectuals'
attitudes to their country might have changed . To that end, they orga–
nized a symposium they called "Our Country and Our Culture." With
Yeats, they worried that the center would not hold, that anarchy was
loose, that innocence was drowned, and that the best no longer had con–
victions, while the worst were brimming with passionate intensity. As
you all know, the magazine's intent was to publish the best writing, to
feature what now tends to be denigrated as high culture, and not to suc–
cumb to the extremes of capitalism, nor to cant and communism.
Some years later, in the 1960s, Dwight Macdonald, in "Masscult and
Midcult," probed into the condition of American culture. He stated that
for at least two centuries there had been a split between traditional high
culture and mass culture, and that the latter "really wasn't culture" but a
patody of it, explicitly produced for the market. Therefore, masscult was
more or less definable by boundaries. Midcult, on the other hand,
respected no boundaries, and thus was insidious: it incorporated and
exploited the discoveries of the avant-garde, and it insinuated itself into
the culture to the point of being indistinguishable from high culture. Why
struggle with real poetry when you can get its effects in capsule form?
Why read sociologists when you can get their condensed findings in the
Tuesday
New York Times?
Why read books when you can get the stories,
plots, and the reviewer's opinion of them in the
Sunday Book Review?
And so on. Macdonald further observed that the lords of kitsch were sell–
ing culture to the masses-masses that eagerly consumed it and didn't
realize that they didn't have the real McCoy. Macdonald, a declared
socialist, now wondered, also, whether we had reached the point where,
by holding on to intellectual and artistic standards, we had become what
we often are accused of being, reactionary and/ or anti-democratic.
And yet, even now, forty years later-as most intellectuals and scien–
tists have turned themselves into specialists and professors in universities,
and most artists live in their own competitive worlds of midcult-there
are holdouts, individuals who are determined to champion all the ideals
of democracy while, at the same time, feeling constrained to undercut the
push towards mediocrity, which, due to market forces, is inevitable. To
what extent, I wonder, is it possible to avoid these forces, while manag–
ing to maintain a bit of style and to keep up with the best that is avail–
able to us? Yes, we can stay away from soap operas and talk shows, or
turn off our television sets altogether, read Bob Brustein's theater reviews
in
The New Republic
rather than the neo-blurbs in the
New York Times;
and follow the art scene by reading Hilton Kramer in
The New Criterion
