Word: midcult
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...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...
...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...
...Fall Partisan Review has arrived, and with it Dwight MacDonald's second article on Masscult and Midcult. This is a theme dear to Mr. MacDonald's heart (as those who heard him speak in Harvard Hall last year will remember); it has the built-in advantage of immediately alienating a certain number of ineffectuals and of subtly flattering the educated majority; thus it is considered controversial. It also permits Mr. MacDonald to indulge in one of his greatest pleasures: insulting Archibald MacLeish...
...explanation for this failure might be that Mr. MacDonald has not entirely extricated himself from "the agreeable ooze of the Midcult swamp." The great, vaulting middlebrow sin is inaccuracy borne of shallow generalization (itself generally the result of ignorance); and this sin Mr. MacDonald freely, even joyfully commits. His first essay was full of misty historical-sociological speculations on High Culture and Mass Culture; his second though not as abundant in middlebrow historiography is still decidedly fertile. One longish quotation will suffice: "The turning point in our culture was the Civil War, whose aftermath destroyed the New England Tradition almost...
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...