Word: midcult
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Midcult, Macdonald believes, is spreading like a "tepid ooze" through American culture. It showed up in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, in which the vivid language of the King James version was pruned away to make easier reading-a feat comparable to "taking apart Westminster Abbey to make Disneyland out of the fragments." Similarly, the Third Edition of Webster's International Dictionary discarded the label "erroneous" for misuse of a word, sanctions any incorrect usage as long as it is common. It calls like, for example, a synonym for as, citing as authority Art Linkletter...
...Against the American Grain, a collection of essays written over the last ten years, Macdonald argues that American standards are threatened in a new and peculiar way. In times gone by, highbrow culture was clearly distinguished from lowbrow; today the two have been blurred by what Macdonald calls "Midcult." "In Masscult," he writes, "the trick is plain: to please the crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways; it pretends to respect the standards of high culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them...
Presbyopia Solemnizations. Midcult authors, writes Macdonald, exploit the discoveries of avant-garde authors. Thus, their works have an apparent profundity when they are only pretentious. Macdonald's favorite Midcult writers include Pearl Buck, John Steinbeck, JP. Marquand, Archibald MacLeish, and even Ernest Hemingway, or at least much of his writing. His prize examples of Midcult are James Gould Cozzens' novel By Love Possessed, with its convoluted prose and jawbreaking Latinisms like "solemnization" and "presbyopic," and Thornton Wilder's Our Town, with its fuzzy philosophizing: "There's something way down deep that's eternal about every...
...late even to apologize to Mr. Freeman for not giving notice to his Apollonian Poems until now. The midcult magazines and the little reviews have discussed this collection already, and a fairly prevalent rumor predicts an article in Time. And the time is long past when the CRIMSON should have recognized the work of a man who has spent most of his mature writing years to date in Cambridge, both as student and tutor...
This astounding conglomeration certainly rivals in presumption any of Hemingway's biblical excesses (the excesses which MacDonald so perceptively attacks a few pages later). Perhaps some day, in some other little magazine, someone will write an article on the hidden danger of high class Midcult--an article perhaps that will examine more adequately the strange elasticity of the middlebrow mind...