Word: midcult
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...fastidious critic, he graced Esquire and The New Yorker with sometimes highhanded pronouncements about movies, books and overblown fads. Observing in a 1960 essay that "the Lords of Kitsch sell culture to the masses," Macdonald famously defined and deflated the tastes of Masscult and Midcult...
...puritan sincerity. Small wonder, then, that a large public considers Wyeth the Great American Artist-or that the opposition to him has been, in some quarters, as violent and irrational as the worship. For it is also the custom to attack Wyeth as a mere illustrator, dazzling the midcult beast with a mixture of sentimentality and cold manual tricks...
People are out there in the land of Midcult, My Not-So-Dear Editor, who should be warned against Marshall McLuhan (compared to whom "Spengler is cautious and Toynbee positively pedantic"). Buckminster Fuller (whose prose reads like Archie the cockroach with his capital shift working). And of course Tom Wolfe-"Parajournalist!" -who presumed to attack The New Yorker, the Golden Arches Macdonald calls home. Could a Macdonald enemies list be complete without those sparring partners Cozzens (James Gould) and Cousins (Norman), the author of By Love Possessed who was by Macdonald savaged and the editor of Saturday Review/World? (When Macdonald...
...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...
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...